Review: Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail

 I was so impressed by Principles that when I couldn't get a copy of Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order, I used one of my audible credits to get an audio book copy. Audio books are not the ideal medium to manage books with graphs and charts, but at least the audible copy comes with a PDF of the graphs and charts frequently referred to in the narration.

Dalio's book essentially turns all of history into a psychohistory exercise. To massively simplify, there are 3 major cycles in history, and when they coincide you get major events that create massive market/world order disruption. These are the capital/debt cycles, the internal order/disorder cycle and the external order/disorder cycle. For each society/country, these cycles drive the society dynamics.

One interesting thing I didn't know before, is that these capital/debt cycles apparently occur enough in history that before modern times there was a tradition of debt jubilees, where all debts are repudiated on a semi-regular 80 year basis, to reset society. The idea behind the capital/debt cycle is that at the start of a cycle (which usually coincides with a new political order), nobody trusts anyone, so all currency has to be hard (traditionally that means gold/silver). After this initial bootstrapping period, people are willing to trust the strong governments, and switch to currencies that are backed by reserves of real assets. At some point, the amount of money circulating exceeds the actual assets that are backing them, and governments have to switch to fiat money. The interesting point that Dalio makes is that the smaller business cycles are self-reinforcing, and generate inequality as a normal part of doing business. For instance, if you got zero'd out during one of the business cycles, you were poor and would be likely to stay poor. If you got rich during one of the business cycles, the nature of capitalism is such that you can now invest in widely diversified portfolio with better than normal returns, and as time went on that would exacerbate the inequality in the system. Hence, the tradition of a debt jubilee (which obviously hurt the wealthiest in society) to reset the system before social revolution takes everything down. The alternative is what was imposed by FDR in the 1940s, which was to raise taxes heavily on the wealthiest people and also reduce inequality through a war and wealth redistribution programs.

The way these debt cycles interact with the internal political order is that as inequality increases over time, and the general population feels that the world is stacked against them, it gets harder and harder to get agreement on what the correct course of action to take for a country, and then all the virtuous cycles that made a country strong now turn into vicious cycles and send the country into a decline. When things get bad enough there's a revolution or regime change, and the cycle starts anew.

Where the book gets interesting is when Dalio points his lens at the current state of affairs in the USA and China. It's probably not to anyone's surprise that he declares the USA to be a powerful empire in the state of decline (anyone who's read the news probably couldn't disagree), while China is the second most powerful empire rising quickly. The argument is that the USA is in greatest danger when internal disorder is at the highest while there's a rising empire ready to challenge it, and the entire thing collides with a Minsky Moment or war.

The disappointing part of the book comes in the details. For instance, Dalio claims that there's no rational reason why the USA should protect Taiwan from China. (Dalio, to his credit discloses that he's spent a ton of time in China listening to and advising elite Chinese politicians, and apparently has spent no time in Taiwan) Yet not long before that he discusses the importance of microchip development in technology. Dalio is apparently unaware that TSMC is a major manufacturer and supplier of chips, and that a Chinese takeover of TSMC facilities would probably disrupt critical chip supplies to American manufacturers (not to mention military) and that would be a strategic problem for the USA. In fact, the Taiwanese know this, and probably consider this one of the main reasons the USA has no choice but to defend Taiwan in the case of a Chinese takeover. At the very least, the manufacturing specialists/engineers in that country would probably get an airlift out of Taiwan should China initiate a military takeover. In any case, Dalio's dismissing of Taiwan as being irrelevant to American interests seems to be a peculiar blind spot.

Similarly, Dalio seems adamant that China will increasingly dominate the world. I certainly wouldn't want to bet against China, but there are certain demographic issues with China's increasingly aging population while the USA continues to attract immigrants who seem determined to move to the USA whether Americans want them there or not.

From the political point of view, Dalio also frequently parrot Asian dictators' declarations that Asian people "prefer" authoritarian leaders that create good economic conditions and provide social stability. Of course, if this was true, Taiwan would voluntarily give up their Democracy and join China the way Hong Kong voluntarily did so. Oh wait. The Hong Kong transition wasn't voluntary, and the events since the Chinese takeover if anything, would definitely provoke resistance amongst the Chinese people living in Taiwan to voluntarily giving up their Democratic government that has done such a good job managing their economy and protecting them from viral pandemics emanating from their neighbor! Dalio all too often seemed to have the very racist view that Asian people by and large don't care about democracy and would be happy to give up freedom in exchange for a totalitarian government, claiming that the Chinese people view the Tiananmen event favorably in retrospect. Similarly he doesn't even mention the Chinese takeover of Tibet. In another section he dismisses intellectual property theft by companies such as Huawei, saying that if those charges were true, there'd be lawsuits. He ignores the fact that there were indeed lawsuits between Cisco and Huawei, as well as several other lawsuits. Certainly in Silicon Valley, it's quite well known that the bug-for-bug compatibility between certain equipment manufacturers and Cisco are not the result of clean room implementations, and of course, I have first hand knowledge from Chinese employees that source repos in China have copyright messages that originate from US companies.

I'm not going to fault Dalio too much for listening to people who have made him wealthy. After all, I've met many Chinese Americans working at FANG companies who are in denial that a major conflict between China and the USA will hurt them personally. Such people seem smug in their complacency, ignoring the artifacts and history so clearly presented and in plain view at Angel Island.

Nevertheless, on balance I think Dalio makes a very good point, which is that within the next 5-10 years there's going to be a reckoning in the USA about its economic system, democracy, and its economic rivalry with China. It's quite clear to me that the USA is close to a civil war, and while the result might kick off the start of another long cycle of prosperity and peace, civil wars are not much fun to live through and if you are in a position to buy insurance against that, you should! Dalio makes the very good point that the most important thing in life is to set yourself up in a situation so that you always have an escape, and that you are never zero'd out during the tumultuous times ahead.

I certainly can't argue against that, and will recommend that you read this book and think through the issues.

Dalio has several supplemental papers at economicprinciples.org. I perused them and was disappointed at how shallow they are. For instance, his solution to fixing capitalism's inequality is to fix the education system. First of all, there's a huge lag time between education improvements and any impact that can be felt by the economy or individuals. Certainly the education approach will not prevent a revolution, nor solve the immediate problem of child poverty. His papers on Universal Basic Income basically dismisses it as being too expensive. All I can say is that for someone like Dalio, it's probably true: he's diversified himself sufficiently (and probably has a bunker in New Zealand) that he and his family will be unimpacted if the USA plunges into a Pinochet-style dictatorship. But for the rest of us, increased redistribution of wealth is a cheap price to pay for retaining our democracy.

Review: T - The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us

 T is written by Carole Hooven, a Harvard evolutionary biologist. The book is about testosterone, but as a side effect it teaches many incidental things that aren't about the science of hormones and how human development works.

For instance, the first lesson is that in a world with billions of people, any kind of genetic mutation/disease that can happen will happen. The book opens with a woman who was born without androgen receptors. So while she had both X and Y chromosomes, her testes never descended, and so she was born with a vagina but no womb, uterus, or fallopian tubes. Her medical plight was interesting but other than not being able to have children she led a normal life. Hooven then goes on to describe various tripes of people with faulty CAH receptors, so babies who were born (and then socialized) as girls would as puberty develop penises (my jaw dropped when I read about this), testicles, and then develop as men!

The second thing that's clear ot me was how Hooven chose to write about these case studies. She's arguing against what seems like a wave of books, literature, and papers in the various social sciences that being male/masculine is socialized, rather than being directly affective by biology. As a layman, I would think that it's obvious that testosterone and other hormonal differences between boys and girls is what drives behavior, but Hooven bends over backwards to give the anti-biologists the benefit of the doubt and makes their case alongside hers.

Of course, in any battle between a real scientist and a social scientist, it's always true that the real scientist wins, with an overwhelming abundance of evidence on her side. For instance, the ancient Chinese and the not so ancient Italians practiced castration (the Chinese to produce eunuchs who could be trusted with the emperor's harem, and the Italians to produce men whose voices would never break and therefore provide soprano voices in a choir that didn't allow women to join its ranks). The elimination of testes in prepubescent boys (I wince even typing these words) shows that without testosterone, many typically masculine traits never develop in such men, including sexual desire, development of a deeper voice, preference for athleticism and sports, and so on and so forth.

From here, Hooven grants both insight into controversial issues of the day (such as transgender women competing in women's events) and an understanding of child development from childhood to puberty to adulthood. I didn't know, for instance, that men have between 10-20 times the amount of testosterone in women, but also that during puberty that spikes to 30:1 ratio differences between boys and girls. Similarly, I didn't know that a sharp spike in testosterone is also what stops adolescent height growth in men, and the castrati were actually taller than average because they never did get that second spike in testosterone.

There's excellent digression into how testosterone rises and falls in deer, and why if testosterone is such an advantage it's not just stuck in the on position all the time. Similarly, an examination in the society of chimps and how it works and what the analogue of testosterone spikes in human society goes. All of it is not just educational but also entertaining. I loved some quotes, such as Robert Sapolsky's note that because testosterone spikes are really about achieving higher status in society, if you went and injected a bunch of buddhist monks with an excess of testosterone what you might get is an increase in random acts of kindness. Now imagine doing that to a bunch of evangelicals.

There's lots more in the book that I can't possibly add here, including real life interviews of transgender people (and one woman who started testosterone injections for several years and then realized she actually wanted to be a woman and switched back) that are both enlightening and touching.

This is a great book and I learned a lot. It provides a much needed discourse in the current discussion about  gender and masculinity. Highly recommended.

Review: Immune

 Immune is a layman's introduction to immunology. Written by a German science popularizer, it's written in easily understood vernacular and came with lavish color illustrations that I ignored, given that I was reading it on a Kindle paperwhite.

The book explains all the dry stuff you might have garnered from other immunology books or articles about the immune system. For instance, what's the innate immune system? How does it interact with the adaptive immune system? What's a mast cell? What's a T-cell? What's the difference between a Helper-T cell, and a Killer-T cell? How does the immune system know when to turn on and off? What's special about Immune, however, is that he also explores the implications you might not have known or even thought about:

why does the body of a woman not recognize sperm cells as other and kill them right away? Well, it does! This is one of the reasons you need about 200 million sperm cells to fertilize a single egg! Right after sperm is delivered into the vagina, it is confronted with a hostile environment that it has to deal with. The vagina is a pretty acidic and deadly place for visitors, so sperm cells move on as fast as possible to escape it. Most of them gain access to the cervix and uterus within a few minutes. Although here they are greeted by an onslaught of Macrophages and Neutrophils that kill the majority of the friendly visitors that are only trying to do their job. Sperm cells are at least a bit equipped to deal with the hostile immune system (a little like a specialized pathogen if you think about it). They release a number of molecules and substances aimed at suppressing the angry immune cells around them, to buy them a little bit of time. And it may actually be the case that they are able to communicate with the cells that line the uterus, to let them know that they are friendly visitors, which might turn down inflammation. But there is a surprisingly large number of things that are not completely understood yet, in these interactions. In any case, from the millions of sperm cells that entered, only a few hundred enter the fallopian tubes and get a shot at fertilizing the egg. (Kindle Loc 1277)

The analogies used in the explanations are clear and a lot of fun, and Dettmer does a great job also of reminding you that he's simplifying a lot of issues. The explanation of how T-Cells get selected in the Thymus is great, and once again, there's a willingness to expose the implications of your shrinking Thymus:

 Your Thymus basically begins shrinking and withering away when you are a small child. A process that is sped up once you reach puberty. Every year you are alive more and more Thymus cells turn into fat cells or just worthless tissue. The university closes more and more departments and gets worse as you age, until around the ripe age of eighty-five, your T Cell university closes its gates for good. Which is sort of horrible if you like the concept of being alive and healthy. There are other places in the body where T Cells can be educated, but for the most part from this point forward your immune system is more limited than before. Because once your Thymus is gone, you have to get by with the T Cells you have trained up to this point. The absence of the immune cell university is one of the most important reasons why seniors are much weaker and more susceptible to infectious diseases and cancer than younger people. (Kindle Loc 1756)

I also enjoyed the sections on how "immune boosting" is not a good idea, including a depiction of real life experiments that went horribly wrong and a reminder of how little we still know about immunology, including the so-called hygiene hypothesis:

Even in developed countries, a number of studies found that children who grow up in the countryside and especially on farms, surrounded by animals and with much more exposure to the outside, suffer significantly less from immune disorders. So while it doesn’t seem to make a difference if a house is clean or not, it does make a difference if it is surrounded by cows and trees and bushes and if dogs roam freely. So what can you take away from this chapter? Wash your hands at least every time you use the restroom, clean your apartment but don’t try to sterilize it, and clean the tools you use to prepare food properly. But let your kids play in the forest. (Kindle Loc 4170)

 Finally, there's an exploration of in addition the allergies, a discussion of how your immune system plays an active job in suppressing cancer, as well as why we have such a hard time developing anti-viral drugs, whereas it still at least seems somewhat possible to develop newer antibiotics.

The book taught me a lot, and I think it's well worth reading. Recommended.

Review: Himawari House

 Himawari House showed up in one of the "best comics of the year" lists and while it was labelled an "indie comic", it sounded interesting, so I checked it out of the library. Indie usually means black and white, bad art, and is to interesting reading what "literary fiction" is to actually good fiction. (For instance, I could never get into Love and Rockets) But Harmony Becker's work was compelling, interesting, and very readable from the get-go: I finished it in a couple of days, and never felt like it was a slog.

Right from the start, the book introduced a new story technique that I'd never seen before, and can only be pulled off by a true multi-lingual artist/writer. The word balloons are in 3 languages (though never all 3 in the same balloon): English, Japanese, and Korean. That's because characters in the book speak a combination of those languages. The conceit is that when a native speaker in a non-English language speaks too fast, the English translation is blurred out, struck through, or deliberately obscured, giving you the same bewildered feeling you get when someone in Japan thinks you're Japanese, and opens up her language stream at you full bore. It is an innovative technique, and it conveys exactly what the author has in mind. Since I can read a smattering of Japanese, I spot-checked many of the word balloons and to the best of my ability, all her Japanese was accurate, and so I assume that her Korean is good as well.

The book revolves around 3 women, Nao (a Japanese American) who moves to Japan for a gap year to learn Japanese better. She ends up in the shared eponymous house, and meets Hyejung (from Korea) and Tina (from Singapore), and the 3 become friends as they go to language school together and spend a year in Japan, learning about each other, and puzzling the men that they share the house with. Becker depicts Singlish accurately, including the code-switching that happens when a Singaporean speaks with someone she knows wouldn't understand the colloquialisms inherent in that dialect of English. Each chapter features a certain slice of life drama, giving you the background behind one of the characters. One of the most endearing pages of the comic has the 3 women saying to themselves that they weren't very good Asians, so they couldn't stay in their home countries, yet picked one of the most xenophobic countries in Asia to move to:

I've never lived in Japan long term, and especially not as an Asian person (many white people have lived in Japan and loved it of course), so I can't speak to the veracity of Becker's depictions, but everything in the book rings true, and none of it is cliched, and none of the events feel like invented drama.

My criticisms of the book? Well, there's a bit of the cliched Asian American "I'm neither Japanese or American" vibe. But it's not written in a "woe-is-me" self-pitying fashion. The author-stand-in character is quite privileged (all the characters are) and the drama consists entirely of first-world problems. The plot: there's no plot. It's a series of slice of life vignettes, linked together by common characters and quite touching. That's not really a criticism. Many TV sitcoms do the same. But I do like a little bit more plot in my books so this is just my personal taste.

In case you can't figure it out, I loved this book. I think you should read it. Even if you don't like the usual Asian American genre, I think you'll like this one. It's not self-centered, and it's multi-cultural in a way that's unique and truthful. It's the best comic I've read in years. Highly recommended.

Review: World War C

 I approached World War C with very limited expectations. After all, we've all had almost 2 years of COVID at this point, and there's been no shortage of coverage of it in the news. What more could you expect? It turned out to be quite a bit. For instance, I didn't know that COVID19 was the 3rd leading cause of death for Americans over 40:

COVID became the third-leading cause of death for individuals forty years old and over in 2020, with an overall annual mortality rate of 325 deaths per 100,000 individuals, behind only cancer and heart disease. In addition, for individuals forty years old and over, the case fatality rate for COVID was greater than the case fatality rate for motor vehicle accidents. (Kindle Loc 3730)

Sanjay Gupta gave more credence to the "lab leak" theory of COVID19 than I would have expected:

 How did a novel bat coronavirus get to a major city in the dead of winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t sold into the epicenter of an outbreak? Their resulting paper, which pointed to two local laboratories where research on bat coronaviruses took place, lived on the Internet for a blip in time before vanishing...The institute has become a world leader on bat coronaviruses and has established one of the largest strain collections, but this lab also has a history of lax safety standards. The world’s outbreak began right in its backyard. Its lab director, Dr. Shi Zhengli, published studies about manipulating bat coronaviruses in a way that could make them more infectious to humans.21 Also known as “Batwoman” for her long history of hunting for coronaviruses in bat caves to study, Zhengli and her colleague Jie Cui are the ones who discovered that the SARS coronavirus likely originated in a population of cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in the Yunnan province in southern China. In their 2017 paper that reported their findings, they warned that “another deadly outbreak of SARS could emerge at any time.”...In 2012, six miners working in a bat-infested copper mine in Yunnan province were infected with a bat coronavirus. All of them developed symptoms exactly like COVID. Three of them died. Number two: Viral samples from these miners were taken to the Wuhan Institute, the only level 4 biosecurity lab in China that was also studying bat coronaviruses. And number three: When COVID made its bona fide Wuhan appearance in late 2019, its closest known relative was the same virus sampled from the Yunnan mine where the miners had been infected. (kindle loc 1250-1278)

Even on the topic of the vaccines, there were little titbits that I didn't know:

 During the Pfizer vaccine trials, twenty-three women volunteers involved in the study became pregnant, and the only one who suffered a pregnancy loss had received not the actual vaccine but a placebo. (Kindle loc 1759)

Dr. Gupta is an inveterate optimist. He's very confident that society will bounce back from COVID.  Like many doctors and scientists, he didn't take the antiscience component very seriously until it stared him in the face:

what caused the failures in America’s COVID response were things that scientists aren’t typically taught to think about during our training: war, political collapse, urbanization, climate change, and, of course, an aggressive antiscience movement...antiscience is one of the biggest threats to humanity, on par with a nuclear weapon: “Antiscience is right up there with things that we build a lot of infrastructure to wall off, like nuclear proliferation, global terrorism, and cyberattacks. We need to do the same with antiscience. We have to treat it just as seriously, and do something about the anti-vaccine groups beyond just amplifying the (science-based) message.” (kindle loc 2157-2179)

There's a little bit of everything: history of pandemics with lessons from 1918, a discussion of how quarantine could have been a little more effective, and even an analysis of the more effective Canadian response. There's also very sobering analysis of how little money the CDC had:

Between 2002 and 2017, the CDC’s core emergency preparedness funding was cut by over 30 percent, or $273 million.11 Insufficient funding has also meant public health labs have been understaffed or shut down, which resulted in painful effects when COVID arrived...the cost to prepare for a pandemic would be a few dollars per citizen—about $30, or the cost of a couple movie tickets. We could have vaccine platforms ready to roll, virus hunters like Wolfe in the field, robust surveillance, and a strong public health infrastructure. None of that seemed important until it became the only thing that is important. (kindle loc 2302-2311)

What's even sadder (and which the very optimistic Dr Gupta doesn't mention) is that many of the public health tools that were available have been recently rolled back, with the net result that rather than providing a wake-up call to American society as to how unprepared we are for pandemics, the politicization of the pandemic has made things worse.

My biggest criticism of the book (which admittedly isn't very big), is that Gupta buys big into the "personal responsibility" piece of healthcare, telling the reader to set clear boundaries on work (ha!) and take time to exercise, eat well, and otherwise take care of yourself. The problem with those prescriptions is that as he himself noted, many of the obesity epidemics in the USA happen in food deserts, and happen to people who are in poverty or who are minorities living in food deserts, or all of the above!  But maybe people who fall into those categories aren't likely to be reading this book either.

The book was surprisingly good, and very readable. Recommended.

Review: Crying in H Mart

 Crying in H Mart showed up in so many "best reads of the year" lists that I felt compelled to check it out of the library and read it. The book is the story of Michelle Zauner's childhood, her relationship with her mom, and the her mom's suffering from cancer. To some extent it's the Asian American whining about not being a part of either world. Much of it of course is attributed to where she lived growing up: in an exurb of Eugene. But the other part of it was that her mother chose to isolate herself from the community, not being Christian.

Much of the memoir surrounds food, which Zauner is amply descriptive of:

I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it. She remembered if you liked your stews with extra broth, if you were sensitive to spice, if you hated tomatoes, if you didn’t eat seafood, if you had a large appetite. She remembered which banchan side dish you emptied first so the next time you were over it’d be set with a heaping double portion, served alongside the various other preferences that made you, you. (kindle loc 209)

 And then there's the very Asian approach to motherly love:

every time I got hurt, my mom would start screaming. Not for me, but at me. I couldn’t understand it. When my friends got hurt, their mothers scooped them up and told them it was going to be okay, or they went straight to the doctor. White people were always going to the doctor. But when I got hurt, my mom was livid, as if I had maliciously damaged her property...Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn’t care if it hurt like hell in the meantime. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this world would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it. “Stop crying! Save your tears for when your mother dies.” (kindle loc 250-263)

That last line would be repeated over and over throughout the book.  Then there's the unique fights between mothers and daughters:

He attempted to console my mother, convince her it was a normal phase, something most teenagers ache in and out of, but she refused to accept it. I had always done well in school, and this shift coincided all too conveniently with the time to start applying to colleges. She saw my malaise as a luxury they’d paid for. My parents had given me too much and now I was full of self-pity. She doubled down, morphing into a towering obelisk that shadowed my every move. She needled me over my weight, the width of my eyeliner, the state of my breakouts, and my lack of commitment to the toners and exfoliants she’d ordered for me from QVC. Everything I wore was an argument. I wasn’t allowed to shut my bedroom door. After school, when my friends would head to one another’s houses for weekday sleepovers, I was whisked away to extracurriculars, then stuck in the woods, left to grumble alone in my room with the door left open. (kindle loc 725)

 The book's prose is vivid, well written, and evocative. Her description of Korean culture rings true, as her rapid marriage to her boyfriend under the impending literal deadline of her mother's mortality. The book does have a happy ending, as Zauner found career success in the wake of her mother's death, and she clearly turned her experience as a caretaker into literary success. Despite the book being a little bit too repetitive and boldly self-congratulatory to me at times, I found myself reading it all in under a week. Recommended.

Review: Zero

 Zero: A Biography of a Dangerous Idea is the rare non-fiction book about mathematics. It doesn't just cover the origin of the concept of zero, but also why zero was soundly rejected by the Western civilizations prior to the start of the renaissance, and why Aristotle's ideas were so dominant during the dark ages.

Once it gets past that early history, the book dives into stuff that you probably already know, such as zero, one, or infinity, complex numbers, quadratic equations, and of course, Zeno's paradox as well as the concepts behind calculus.  The focus on history also shows through in this context and was great, since the concept of taking limits is frequently poorly explained in high school textbooks, and someone like me could use a refresher once in a while.

Once the calculus is explained the book shifts gears again to talk about physics: from quantum mechanics to relativity's black  holes, the book does a good job of explaining how singularities happen and imply real world effects, but this is the part of the book that's probably about stuff you already know if you're a science aficionado.

All in all, I enjoyed the book. It provided a much needed refresher for certain topics while providing the history behind certain concepts that I never knew. Recommended.

Review: Termination Shock

 Termination Shock is Neal Stephenson's novel about geo-engineering to cool down the atmosphere. It is a massive novel, clocking in at 716 pages, and contains many classic Neal Stephenson shticks, including massive detours into a character's completely irrelevant past history (one of the main character was a feral pig hunter in Texas), and a plot setup that's wooden and doesn't stand up to any kind of critical thinking.

The book's proposed solution to climate change is to pump sulphur into the stratosphere. The Termination Shock described in the title refers to a backlash effect should the continual stream of sulfur injection stops. Strangely enough, that's not actually covered in the book at all, and the Termination Shock refers to the global implications causing foreign actors to move on the sulfur injection facilities. The actual details behind how sulfur injection would work to reduce climate changes are only alluded to, rather than described, which is rather uncharacteristic of Stephenson's work. There's an implication that this action while providing cooling still would be incomplete: ocean acidification would be unsolved, but Stephenson never follows up on any of this.

Stephenson's vehicle of choice for geo-engineering isn't government or activist action, but of course, that favorite troupe of science fiction, the billionaire entrepreneur who calculates that a reduction in temperature in Texas would benefit his real-estate holdings by much more than the cost of sulphur injection. In classic fashion, he doesn't bother consulting with anyone, but just implements it, only inviting the Queen of the Netherlands to take part in the initial launch. What follows is a split-thread involving a Gatka fighter and various Chinese actors. Those side threads, unfortunately don't involve anything more than cliches.

As with other Stephenson novels, the prose is eminently readable, and once in a while you have a real gem, such as:

One part of her was incredulous that people would live here. Could anything less sustainable be imagined? She was drinking water from a bottle made of petrochemicals. At three in the morning the temperature was still so high that humans could not sleep unless they ran air conditioners powered by generators that burned more petroleum. The generators and the air conditioners alike dumped more heat into the air. Over dinner, Rufus—speaking in an understated, deadpan, almost scholarly way—had told the story about the fire ants and the relays in the air conditioners. Over dessert, Beau talked about meth gators in a much more exuberant style. It made Texas sound about as hospitable as the surface of Venus. But Saskia was conscious of the fact that she and her people had been living in an unsustainable country for so long that it was the only thing they knew. If the pumps that held back the North Sea were shut off, the country would be flooded in three days. There was no place they could retreat to. If anything, Texas was more sustainable than the Netherlands. It was mostly above sea level, it produced its own oil, and when that ran out, the Texans could have all the wind and solar energy they felt like collecting. (kindle loc 1697)

and, in reflection about the choice to live in places like Indonesia:

 He could have moved, of course, and lived out the rest of his life in a part of the world characterized by greater political stability. But having seen shit you wouldn’t believe in Indonesia, he had arrived at the conclusion that political stability anywhere was an illusion that only a simpleton would believe in. That (invoking, here, a version of the anthropic principle) such simpletons only believed they were right when and if they just happened to live in places that were temporarily stable. And that it was better to live somewhere obviously dangerous, because it kept you on your toes. Willem had thought all this daft until Trump and QAnon. (kindle loc 9372)

The book kept me reading, but when it finished made me think of all the plot-holes involved, and the complete misdirection (one of the major POV characters effectively does nothing), and I decided that other Stephenson novels such as Seveneves  are much better reads and not as obviously full of plot-holes.

Review: Wacool Snorkeling Set for Kids

 On a snorkeling trip you need good masks and snorkels. I've long maintained that even if you're not planning to snorkel, the mask/snorkel is the best way to teach your kids how to swim. The Wacool Set has a high quality tempered glass mask, and a decent snorkel. The snorkel mouthpiece is too big for Boen, so we had to substitue the one from a previous purchase for when Bowen was smaller.

We've spent  lots of money on various swimming equipment for kids over the years, but these pay for themselves on one sailing trip, and I can recommend them.

Review: Matador Freerain 32

 I was so impressed  by the Matador Beast that when I saw the Freerain 32 on sale at REI I snapped it up and bought it, guaranteeing that California will be in the drought for at least the next 10 years. I did travel to Antigua over Thanksgiving, so that gave me a chance to use the backpack in anger.

The backpack rolls up and stuffs into the provided stuff sack nicely, and is very compact. The distinguishing feature is that the hydration pocket is a separate, waterproof compartment, which means that a hydration pack failure won't create problems if it leaked. The external mesh pocket is much more useful than the one on the Matador Beast, and the backpack's main compartment and hydration pockets (which is also waterproof'd with a zipper) can both fit a Macbook Pro 16.

The backpack form factor is much better than the typical drybag form factor. That's because you can wear it and have both hands free for manipulating dinghies, lines, and recalcitrant kids. I discovered this one day when we had to manhandle the dinghy. In retrospect, on that day I should have taken the extra time to put the cameras and phones into the backpack and freed up an extra pair of hands to help with the dinghy! In any case, I got thoroughly wet, and all the contents in the backpack stayed dry.

Matador has stopped producing the Freerain 32, chosing to replace it with 2 smaller models, but you can buy this one from Moosejaw on closeout. The backpack itself is recommended.

Review: Blue Lizard Sunscreen SPF 30

 On a sailing/snorkeling trip, you can't use my favorite brush-on sunblock. That's because you might have to apply the sunscreen to wet skin, and the horse hair brushes on the brush-on would get wet and essentially become useless.

As usual, I look for titanium dioxide or zinc oxide sunscreen with no chemicals. Blue Lizard sunscreen came up as a search result and was ranked highly by sites such as Wirecutter. The problem with titanium dioxide or zinc oxide sunscreen is that they're harder to put on and rub in. The solution to that is to do it right. I picked the SPF 30, because me and my kids are brown people, not white people, and the savings is substantial. (Note that SPF 30 filters 97% of UVB, while SPF 50 filters 98%, so you're paying a lot for that extra 1%)

The sunscreen comes in a white bottle that turns blue in the presence of UV light. The marketing claims that it turns blue when the amount of UV is dangerous, but my experience on the Chinook was that ANY UV would cause it to turn blue, so the bottle is there to basically make you put on sunscreen during the day. The sunscreen is efficient. Between me and the two kids, with me wearing a rash guard and the kids wearing wet suits, it took us 5 days to use up a 5oz bottle. That's including a day when Bowen went to the beach with just swimming trunks and no top.

None of us got burned, and when I took Bowen in for his annual physical the day after we came back from the trip, the pediatrician complimented me by saying, "I couldn't tell you'd just come back from the tropics!" That's high praise, so I'll mark this sunscreen recommended.

2021 Antigua: Thoughts & Reflections

 I've done a number of sailing trips, and in recent years have had those magical days where everything goes right, including the most recent one on Xiaoqin's birthday. I've thought a lot about how those magic days happen, and why they happen when they do. Here are what I think the pre-requisites are:

• No external or internal constraints. If you're required to be some place somewhere at a specific time, the constraints prevent you from having the flexibility to make a magic day happen. That's why magic days almost never happen at the start of a trip. If you're a typical American, your vacation time is fixed, and you'll spend the first few days of your trip rushing about and getting certain things done. There was no chance you can have a magic day when you have to provision, or get a PCR test. One thought is that Europeans, who can sail for 2 weeks or a month at a time might have more magic days than Americans do.
• Familiarity with the Area. You can only have a magic day when you know the area well. This includes the wind/wave conditions (e.g., on a North Swell, you want to be on the south side of an island). Your chances of having a magic day are much reduced if you don't know where/when the optimal location to be at is. This is very similar to Galen Rowell's admonition to "look for the rainbow in the anti-solar position before 10am."
• An open-ness to serendipity. A cruise with a fixed itinerary will almost never have a magic day. That's because you can't change your plans to fit the conditions, so you'll never have a day of perfection.

You can't control what they day will bring, whether it's a bike tour or a sailing trip. But you can maximize your chances of a great experience:

• Schedule longer trips, not more trips. This helps eliminate the external/internal constraints.
• Do repeated visits to the same or similar areas. This builds familiarity with local environment and makes your decisions better.
• Seize the opportunities when they arrive.

Antigua was very pretty and well worth visiting. Flying through Canada was safer while we only had half-vaccinated kids, but was really an ordeal when the plane ran late. I definitely think that without COVID restrictions at play, it would have been useful to visit Antigua for longer (a 2 week trip) which would have enabled us to visit St Kitts/Nevis and/or Guadeloupe as well. But with the time we had and the COVID19 restrictions in existence it was neither responsible nor practical. Definitely something to think about for a longer trip.

Review: The Remarkable Life of the Skin

 I read The Remarkable Life of the Skin during a sailing trip in the Caribbean, which made the early chapters on how tanning and melanin work really resonate with me:

Overnight, keratinocytes proliferate rapidly, preparing and protecting our outer barrier for the sunlight and scratches of the coming day. During the day, these cells then selectively switch on genes involved with protection against the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays. A 2017 study took this one step further and found, rather remarkably, that midnight feasts could actually cause sunburn.14 If we eat late at night, our skin’s clock assumes that it must be dinner time and consequently pushes back the activation of the morning-UV-protection genes, leaving us more exposed the next day. So while studies are increasingly showing that a lack of sleep is detrimental to our overall physical and mental health, it now seems that our skin also benefits from additional sleep. (page 9)

 The next few chapters describe how amazing the skin is, including how it's carefully acidic for a particular reason:

The acids in sebum also keep the surface of the skin slightly acidic (between a pH of 4.5 and 6), which deters potentially dangerous bacteria, while those that adapt to this environment will be consequently less able to thrive if they manage to get past the skin and infect the alkaline environment of the blood. (pg. 13)

This is followed by chapters on touch, how skin recovers from wounds and activate the immune system, and even how tattoes work:

 The most impressive feature of Meissner corpuscles is that they literally catch us every time we fall. As you hold the key, it actually slips a thousandth of a millimetre a number of times a second. Our Meissner corpuscles can detect this loss and, in a series of rapid reflexes, cause our skin to tighten so that we don’t end up dropping the object. All of this is completely subconscious. (pg. 113)

 We essentially create an infinite infection. So if you sport a tattoo, spare a thought for the little fellows who went into battle thinking they were fighting an infection but were instead fated to spend the rest of their days embedded in your skin-based art. (pg. 176)

There are also entire chapters on skin diseases, including exotic ones like leprosy and river blindness, which I didn't realize was a skin disease as well. The social implications of skin coloring (such as albinism, not just race) are also covered, and in well-written fashion. After reading this book I took Bowen to the pediatrician where she told him his skin was so dry that he needed moisturizer twice a day. The knowledge in the book prepared me to treat her recommendations seriously (eczema is no joke and can lead to infection).  The book was therefore well worth my time.

Index Page: 2021 Antigua Thanksgiving Sail

 From November 21 to November 28th, Arturo, Niniane, and my family did a week long cruise in the sailing catamaran, the Chinook. This was our first international trip since the pandemic, and the trip itself had been canceled previously, when it was supposed to happen in April 2020. At the last minute, Mark Brody had to cancel, and Niniane substituted. It was my first time in  Antigua, and everyone had a good time. This is the index page with links to the day by day reports, as well as photos.

Photos

• Piaw's Photos

Trip Journal

• November 20-21: Prologue
• November 22: Jolly Harbor to Carlisle Bay
• November 23rd: Carlisle Bay to Green Island
• November 24th: Green Island to Long Island
• November 25th: Long Island to Coco Point, Barbuda
• November 26th: Coco Point, Barbudad to Deep Bay, Antigua
• November 27th: Deep Bay to Carlisle Bay
• November 28th: Carlisle Bay to Jolly Harbor + Epilogue
• Thoughts and Reflections

Review: Chemistry for Breakfast

 I randomly loaded Chemistry for Breakfast onto my kindle for a trip, and started reading it with very low expectations. After all, I already knew a lot about valence electrons, the periodic table, etc. But after reading the first couple of chapters I got thoroughly sucked in. I loved the way she talked about the work of science, demonstrating her passion for it while not flinching from the cruel reality science offers as a career:

It isn’t necessarily the salary that scares people away from academic careers. To progress at a university, you need to sacrifice your private life and sleep on the altar of science. Christine never goes a weekend without working. Although we live in the same city, I usually only see her when I visit her lab. And all this work doesn’t guarantee job security. You move from one fixed-term contract to the next. And an academic career path has just one destination: a tenured professorship. If you’re extremely good, you might reach this point by your late thirties. Although very few people—and only the very best—make it to the habilitation stage, there simply aren’t enough tenured professorships. Hard work, intelligence, and talent aren’t enough; you also need to be really lucky. If you don’t manage to secure tenure, then at some point you’ll find yourself totally overqualified, possibly even applying for the same industry jobs as your own students. (kindle loc 1109)

 In one chapter she excerpts a famous letter written by a professor to one of his students, berating him for taking a vacation instead of spending all the nights and weekends at the lab. (One of my friends in graduate school one day found himself apologizing for leaving the lab at 8pm on a weekend) She explains why many untenured professors are so cruel:

In a company, every boss has a boss. The executive board members have shareholders or an employee organization breathing down their necks. In theory, the only person a professor answers to is God, and since scientists tend to be atheists, they have absolute power (kindle loc 1593)

I shouldn't leave you with the impression that the book is all about how bad academic science is. First and foremost it's a book about chemistry and science. And it's really fun, includnig a description of a study of flatulence:

In 1998, scientists from Minneapolis studied the flatulence of sixteen men and women to identify the odor substances. At first, pretty much all the participants had to do was fart into a tube. Of course, you can’t leave anything to chance in a scientific study. So the evening before and the morning of the study, the participants’ food was supplemented with 200 grams (7 ounces) of beans and 15 grams (1/2 ounce) of lactulose, a sugar with a prebiotic effect that is broken down by the intestinal bacteria, thereby forming gas...two “judges” were employed to assess how unpleasant the odors actually were. Why only two? Well, you try finding people willing to smell fart samples in the name of science—and, of course, you need a very sensitive nose to assess them with the greatest possible scientific accuracy. In any case, these two judges had previously proven to have very sensitive noses and the ability to assess both odor quantity (how strong is the odor?) and quality (how do the odors differ?) particularly well. They rated various odor samples on a scale of 0 (odorless) to 8 (very offensive). They also had to precisely describe the smell of individual, isolated gases. Sulfurous? Rotten? Sweet? A simple “disgusting” wouldn’t be specific enough. A fart is largely made up of odorless gases like hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide (CO2). (kindle loc 1766-1771)

 There's a great section about why you shouldn't be afraid of artificial flavors:

If you know which molecules create the flavor of a natural fruit, you can either extract them (from a natural source) or produce the molecules yourself in a laboratory (CHEMISTRY!). Provided they have the same chemical structure, there’s no difference between molecules from nature and molecules from a lab; it’s just that nature is a far more accomplished chemist than all human chemists put together. Flavor often traces back to a sophisticated blend of molecules, while artificial flavors often have a simpler composition. This also means that artificial flavors are just as safe as natural ones, if not safer, because every single ingredient in the artificial flavor has been identified and tested. (kindle loc 1522)

The entire book was breathtakingly good, and I enjoyed every minute of it. It's well worth your time. Read it. I wish her youtube work was in English, but to make up for it, Chemistry for Breakfast is accessible, enlightening, and full of great information.

 

November 28th: Carlisle Bay to Jolly Habor + Epilogue: ANU to SFO

A storm had blown in the night before, sending rain occasionally and turning around the boat all night. I was fast asleep, and but Arturo reported that the music from ashore had been faint and didn't disturb his sleep at all!

Once I had breakfast and coffee, I got into the water and checked and indeed, the anchor was now properly buried. From the water, I shot one last photograph of the Chinook before engaging in more snorkeling.

In the morning light, the snorkeling was excellent, and Arturo even found a moray eel!

 It was a great way to send us off. We got back onto the boat at 8:00am, rinsed off, using the last of the water left in the water tank, and proceeded to pack up. Turning on the engine, we motor'd back to Jolly Harbor using the autopilot, and then gingerly edged into the Marina's fuel dock, fueling up the diesel. We could not refill with gasoline for the dock didn't have gasoline that day.

Ashley had sent Mario to take us back to our slip, and then we had to finish up the paperwork, take our luggage out of the boat. Air Canada texted me saying that our flight was delayed by 3.5 hours, so we had a leisurely lunch at the SeaDream, run by an Italian. Arturo suggested that we visited his hotel rather than spend 6 hours waiting at the airport, so we visted the Buccaneer Beach Resort and made good use of the swimming pool until Niniane and Arturo's rooms was ready.

The delayed flight meant that we arrived at Toronto at midnight, and once there we had to do more paperwork because the airline had lost our luggage! The transborder short-cut that would mean that we didn't have to do security was closed, and we ended up getting to our hotel at 2am, after being forced to exit and doing yet more PCR tests. We'd get 3 hours of sleep, then go back to the Toronto for the next day's flight, which was delayed but only once we'd boarded the plane.

Once in San Francisco, our lost luggage became an asset as we could just walk out onto the Lyft pickup area and get a ride right away back home. Our first post-pandemic international trip was over.

November 27th: Deep Bay to Carlisle Bay

The night before, a storm swirled by and rocked the boat. Xiaoqin woke me up so I could check the boat but as far as I could tell the boat hadn't moved so I went right back to sleep until the morning.

As expected, the water around the Andes was just as murky in the morning after breakfast as it was the afternoon before. With our plans blown out of the water, we had no choice but to turn on the engine, weigh anchor, and head out of Deep Bay down South. Mario had wanted us in Five Islands Harbor for our last night for an easy return the next morning. But my guess was that he had no experience with sailors who got up at 6:00am every morning while on vacation, and I was determined to measure the time it would take to get from Jolly Habor to Carlisle Bay via motor.

As we rounded Johnson's point, I noticed that the wind had picked up to about 6 to 8 knots. Since it was still early in the day, I expected that we might be able to sail from English Harbor to Carlisle Bay. The decision to spend the night at Carlisle Bay was pure risk reduction: English Harbor to my mind had better snorkeling.  I timed 45 minutes from Jolly Harbor to Carlisle Bay, with a northward current that should assist us the next morning.

To our dismay, as we approached Falmouth Harbor, we saw another cruise ship parked outside what looked like English Harbor. This wasn't going to be fun, but Niniane noted that this was a 400 person cruise ship, and we were relieved when we saw that its lifeboats were unloading people not at English Habor, but at Falmouth Harbor.

Arriving at English Harbor we dropped anchor at the same spot we did before with confidence, snugged it up, and proceeded to drop the dinghy to visit tank bay. Niniane had noted that the bakery was closed, this being a weekend, so we weren't even tempted to try to eke out a lunch there. We bought sufficient food not only for our last night, but also for the two days ashore that Arturo and Niniane would have after we returned the Chinook. Once back on the Catamaran we got out the snorkel gear and to our relieved, discovered that the water clarity was excellent.

This time, we swam all the way out to the Pillars of Hercules, and saw flatfish. Xiaoqin also explored the inside of the Bay and discovered a wreck and a turtle!

When we were all done with the snorkeling, we weighed anchor and motor'd out of the harbor. Once I had the boat pointed towards Carlisle Harbor, however, I asked not for the main to be raised, but for the Jib. "Why just the Jib?" It's only 3 nautical miles, and even at 3 knots that's an hour, and saves having to point the boat into the wind, and the trouble of raising and lowering the main. I actually expected stronger winds as the afternoon built, but I wasn't counting on it.

To my surprise not 15 minutes had gone by when a pod of dolphins (3 of them, 2 adults and a juvenile) joined us. They would follow us all the way to Carlisle Bay. Mario would tell us later that indeed, that was the one place on Antigua where you would most likely encounter dolphins. I shot and stitched together a video.

It was a magical journey, and as expected the winds picked up and soon was driving us at 4-5 knots with only one sail up! The mainsail would have given us at most 1.5 additional knots, at the expense of having to deal with the main, and who was in a hurry when there were dolphins to watch! I had to adjust the heading of the boat because the current was pushing us towards shore, but fortunately Arturo had checked the GPS and we had caught it before we got close to shore. The sight of these magnificant sea mammals filled us with awe.

Arriving at Carlisle Bay, we turned the boat into the Bay before turning on the motor, this time knowing that we wanted to be far away from the loud music. There were other boats in the Habor, but I knew the motorboat in the spot I wanted to be in was going to leave --- it wasn't equipped for an overnight stay, so I deliberately anchored closer to it than I would have if it had been a boat equipped for a longer stay. Dropping anchor, I felt it slip and then catch, but Arturo let out more chain just to be sure. The dive check revealed that the anchor slipped because it had pushed a rock out of the way, but looked steady.

Our last snorkel of the day gave us lion fish (an invasive species for the Caribbean), and made me realize how good the boys were at snorkeling now, with Boen attempting to dive even in his wet suit.

Other parents might obsess with their kids being fast in the water, joining swimming clubs and participating in sporting events, etc., but more than anything else, my goal had always been for my children to be comfortable in the water, able to deal with exigencies and difficult situations, and enjoy experiencing the natural world as much as they could. They had clearly gotten there.

We were out of the water before sunset, and prepped a dinner and celebrated Xiaoqin's birthday with a birthday cake, with a match substituting for a candle.

But perfect as the day was, it wasn't over yet. After sundown, we saw bioluminescence around the boat, and as the stars came out, Xiaoqin saw a shooting star! It was truly as perfect a birthday as you could get.

Review: Why Geese Don't Get Obese

 Why Geese Don't Get Obese is a book on the physiology of animals in comparison to our own, and how our lifestyle as well as our unique features make us susceptible to problems that other creatures don't. It contains many titbits that are really relevant to parents. For instance:

Large numbers of new fat cells are not created—that happens primarily in early life. But if there were twice as many fat cells around to begin with, there would be that many more fat cells with the capacity to become fatter. So, the idea goes, it is especially important not to overfeed young children and toddlers, because this is the time when they can still make additional adipocytes. Overeating, therefore, will cause growth of both the number and the size of fat cells. It is highly probable that overeating in newborns leads to adults with lots of extra adipocytes, just waiting for that next cupcake or scoop of ice cream. (page 28)

This partially explains why obesity runs in families. There are lots of fascinating sections about lung capacity, hormonal responses, and sweat, some of which I didn't know. For instance:

 Although perspiration on our upper lip may taste salty, it is actually less salty than our blood. The water in the perspiration comes from our internal stores of water. Thus, when we perspire heavily on a hot day, we lose both water and salt but proportionately more water than salt. (pg. 45)

The section on marine mammals is great. For instance, I did not know that seals expelled all residual air from their lungs before they dove, which is one reason they don't get decompression sickness by ascending rapidly. It turns out that lungs don't hold much more than about 2 minutes of air, which is insignificant for the length of dives the seals and otters do. Avoiding decompression illness is worth losing those two minutes. 

I enjoyed the book, even though it's short, and the epilogue is even more interesting, as it describes the experiment on geese which required putting them on a treadmill while measuring their oxygen intake.  The diagram is thoroughly entertaining and well worth the time to read. Recommended.

November 26th: Coco Point, Barbados to Deep Bay, Antigua

Despite not needing an early start this day, we woke up early anyway, in time to see the glorious sunrise from Coco point. The beach, the water, and the sun came together to create magical lighting for us as we ate a leisurely breakfast, and then prepared to get into the water.

We elected to all swim into the beach. But the visibility had gotten much worse overnight, and we saw next to nothing on the swim. We left the kids to play on the beach while Arturo and I went to scout the south side of Barbados, hoping for something better.

 It was indeed better after we got past the rocky section near the beach which was just as murky as the West coast. It would have been better if we had snorkeled there yesterday, however. I got a few pictures and then after that we went back and I swapped with Xiaoqin while Arturo led Xiaoqin on another snorkel.

The two kids were happy to play on the beach, and with conditions as murky as this I didn't bother trying to sell them on getting into the water except to return to the boat. By the time both Xiaoqin and Bowen were done it was 8:30am, and we swam back to the boat, ready to head to Deep Bay and try the Andes.

The wind was once again too weak to sail, and as we approached the Diamond Reef passage a storm blew through, tricking us into raising the sails only to discover moments later, that we were back to sailing at 1.5 knots, which was unsatisfying. The reason we were headed to Deep Bay was that my family needed PCR tests to fly back to the USA through Canada, and a doctor had agreed to come out to meet us and take PCR tests so we wouldn't have to take a taxi to a hospital

Arriving in Deep Bay, we spotted the buoy marking the mast of the Andes, and two Catamarans, clearly tourist boats, beached on the Bay. It turned out that not one, but two cruise ships were visiting Antigua that day. We anchor'd close to the beach in about 3 meters of depth, and to my dismay, when we did the dive check for the anchor, we couldn't see much. In fact, Arturo had to follow the anchor chain down so I could spot where it was!

We lowered the dinghy. The guidebook had a section marked on the other side of the Bay marked as "dinghy entrance", and it had the bridge that the doctor had wanted to meet us at. Just in case it was a better entrance, we decided to check it out, after determining that visibility at the Andes was no better than at the Chinook. The bridge was there, but there was no way we were going to steer the dinghy into the entrance in those conditions. "Why is there such a north swell? Why is the visibility so bad? Is there a storm?" Arturo looked at his phone. "Oh yeah. There's a tropical storm West of here down South." Our hopes for doing a good snorkel at the Andes, which was famous throughout Antigua was shot.

I received a text via WhatsApp from the doctor that he was headed our way. We got everyone into the dinghy, and got ashore, tying the dinghy to a tree. We raised the outboard, but neglected to pull the dinghy all the way out above the waterline, something we would pay for later. Walking over to the bridge, we had to wait a few minutes but sure enough the doctor showed up to give the 4 of us our PCR tests.

Mario had told us to hike Fort Barington at sunset, so we dutifully went back over the bridge, up the other side, and climbed up to the fort.

Far in the distance, we could see Mont Serrat's volcano erupting! People living near the volcano were evacuated even as we witnessed the smoke coming out of it.

At the fort, we finally got a group picture for the first time on our trip. Past that, we could keep going all the way to the point where the North Swell had flooded the channel that apparently in calmer times would let you walk or wade over to the headland guarding the Bay entrance.

It was approaching sunset when we returned to the dinghy when to our horror the surge and incoming tide had repeatedly dumped sand into the dinghy. We didn't have anything to bail with, so there was nothing to do but place everyone into the boat, but in the ensuing confusion and chaos (as the tide was relentlessly pounding away at us as we loaded the boat) Arturo got the rope in his hand at the wrong moment and pulled in it just a bit too hard and got rope burn. Nevertheless we got everyone back onboard the Chinook, and ice out of the fridge for Arturo's hand. I was a bit shaken: the memories of that trip in St. Vincent when a dinghy capsized and threw me overboard returned to me. We got away with just rope burn on Arturo's hand. Fortunately, all our important documents  (needed for our PCR test) were in a waterproof backpack that had stayed dry and secure in all the antics. In retrospect the non-waterproof camera should have also gone into that backpack.

Over a somber dinner, we debated what to do the next day. We were too exhausted to deal with the dinghy, so just tied it to the Chinook overnight. Being familiar with North Swell conditions, I proposed that we return to the South end of the island to Carlisle Bay and English Harbor for our last night aboard the Chinook. I revealed my agenda, which was that tomorrow was Xiaoqin's birthday, and going to English Harbor would allow us to get cake at the Tank Bay supermarket. Arturo shrugged. We really wanted to do the Andes snorkel, but I was pessimistic about it.

Review: A Small Place

 A Small Place is Jamaica Kincaid's short essay about Antigua. It drips with sarcasm and tastes of bitterness. Right off the bat, you get an examination of how history glorifies the industrial revolution when the reality was that a huge amount of its wealth came from slavery:

he West got rich not from the free (free—in this case meaning got-for-nothing) and then undervalued labour, for generations, of the people like me you see walking around you in Antigua but from the ingenuity of small shopkeepers in Sheffield and Yorkshire and Lancashire, or wherever; and what a great part the invention of the wristwatch played in it, for there was nothing noble-minded men could not do when they discovered they could slap time on their wrists just like that (isn’t that the last straw; for not only did we have to suffer the unspeakableness of slavery, but the satisfaction to be had from “We made you bastards rich” is taken away, too), and so you needn’t let that slightly funny feeling you have from time to time about exploitation, oppression, domination develop into full-fledged unease, discomfort; you could ruin your holiday. (page 9)

 Even though Antigua has been an independent country for some time now, Kincaid doesn't let up on its former colonists, which she blames for teaching its corrupt leaders how to behave:

Have you ever wondered to yourself why it is that all people like me seem to have learned from you is how to imprison and murder each other, how to govern badly, and how to take the wealth of our country and place it in Swiss bank accounts? Have you ever wondered why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants? (Page 34)

The book exposes all the corruption, and the sad state of governance on the island, interspersed with scenes from the island describing its beauty and its colors and people. To a large extent, I do wish Kincaid's visited some other former colonies of England's that weren't mismanage. For instance, Singapore was also a former colony, but wasn't nearly as badly mismanaged, and its population is also much larger than Antigua's, so you can't even use the excuse that managing Singapore was an easier job.

To some extent, of course, was luck. Singapore's leaders while every bit as dictatorial as any tyrants could be, at least recognized that rooting out corruption was key to have a successful economy and country. Ultimately, that makes its rulers better off as well, enabling them to have a dynasty that's more stable. The question I'm left with is, "At what point can former colonist countries stop blaming their former colonists and start taking responsibility for the fate of their country?" Kincaid doesn't answer that question. I'll answer it for her anyway: "At what point do you as an adult stop blaming your parents for not giving you a good character forming childhood and start taking responsibility for your actions?"