Review: Self-Made Man

 I ran across Self-Made Man from an unusual answer on Quora where the author of the answer described Norah Vincent as a Lesbian who thought that men had it better, and then decided to become one for a year, and the experience taught her that men lived in such a harsh world that she had a nervous breakdown at the end of her research. With that kind of an intro I had to check the book out of the library and read it.

I really enjoyed the book because of the amount of dedication she put into it. She got professional teachers to teach her how to walk like a man, put on a disguise (like a reverse Clark Kent, when she put on her glasses, people believed that she was a man), and got a voice coach to teach her how to speak like one too. She lifted weights to the point where her shoulders were broad enough that she could pass as a man. She wrote that she was a tomboy growing up, but despite that when she visited a monastery and lived there even the monks thought her alter-ego (named Ned) was gay!

Ned went to places and met with people that I never did. S/he went to a bowling club that was made up of mostly blue-collar workers, made friends with them, and listened to their concerns and became their buddy. Despite being bad at bowling, her team put up with her and didn't get too upset when she flubbed game after game. But of course, being men, they had to give her tip after tip. At the end of her research with them she did tell them that she was a woman, and to her surprise, one of them started defending gay people after that. She attended strip clubs but found them boring, and even paid for a lap dance out of curiosity.

Her time at a monastery was interesting. The monks decided she was gay and thought she was falling in love with one of the other monks, and warned her off! I found that hilarious. When she revealed that she was a woman at the end of the stay, they were happy to forgive her, and she noted that for one of the monks, his attitude towards her didn't change at all! She wrote that he was the only person throughout her research he was the only one whose attitude didn't change with her gender.

Her last two research  projects were a sales job selling entertaining books and a men's retreat. It was very clear that at her interviews people wanted very different displays from men than from women. She stated that she was expected to exaggerate, brag about how good she was, etc. At the men's retreat, she realized how broken the men who attended such things were --- they couldn't talk about their feelings, and needed social support to be able to hug each other. After that, she had her nervous breakdown.

Overall, I thought the book was a sympathetic look at the life of men. From a young age we tell boys that they don't cry, and at some point we beat the vulnerability out of them. But what do you expect from a society that expects men to enlist in the selective service? But of course that makes men a mystery to many women, and it takes an unusual one to want to pierce that veil of gendered ignorance. I applaud Vincent and can recommend this book.

Review: The Order of Time

 I've read previous books by Carlo Rovelli, but didn't seek out The Order of Time, until I noticed that Bendict Cumberbatch, who somehow manages to get all these roles playing smart people. I enjoyed his voice in various movies I've seen him in, so I checked it out from the library.

The opening chapters of the book covers the usual stuff about time: entropy, the laws of thermodynamics (including a visit to Boltzmann's grave), as well as an introduction to relativity (which plays a very strict relationship to time). I love the metaphors and similes used throughout the book to describe physics, and Cumberbatch does such a good job enunciating and reading it, that I played the book back at 1.0 speed, rather than my preferred 1.3x. 

Right in the middle of the book he declares that time is an emergent property of increasing entropy, rather than key to the fundamental laws of physics. I'm not sure I buy that, but I lack any better ideas.

Regardless, I enjoyed the book, it's a short read, and the lyrical descriptions themselves are well worth listening to, regardless of whether you appreciate the actual material. Recommended.

Review: Evolution Gone Wrong

 Evolution Gone Wrong is the book about humanity's poorly designed bodies.  This is such a good genre of books, that I could read multiple books like this and not get tired of it. It's the perverse side of the usual self-congratulatory books about how well designed our bodies are.

The book covers diverse topics such as the shape of our jaw and why we have too many teeth for the size of our jaws (answer: the evolutionary path of teeth and jaws are different, and post-agricultural revolution jaws are smaller, since cooked food doesn't require as much chewing and jaw strengthening exercises so our jaws continued shrinking). It covers why humans choke on food (the larynx is lowered so the humans can speak to each other), and myopia:

Children who spend greater chunks of their day outside have a lesser risk of developing myopia than children who spend their days inside. It doesn’t matter how they spend their time outside. The outdoorsy kids in the studies spent as much total time on screens as the indoorsy kids. They didn’t have to be kicking a soccer ball or climbing a tree. Even if they were playing around on their phones, as long as they were doing it outside, they were less likely to become myopic. It is a shocking result given the total buy-in to the eye-strain hypothesis. (kindle loc 865)

What's interesting is the study on sleep, indicating that even Chimpanzies make the bed:

 They sampled 1,844 chimpanzee night beds (take a second to appreciate that large sample size) and discovered that chimps used the same type of tree to build a nest in 73.6% of cases. Interestingly, the preferred tree made up only 9.6% of the trees in the forest. In other words, the sleepy chimps were not grabbing branches at random and knocking out shoddy, makeshift beds. They were being selective about their mattress materials. The sleep researchers also analyzed the properties of the preferred trees. In the article they published in the journal PLOS ONE, they note that the most coveted type of tree was a species of ironwood that “was the stiffest and had the greatest bending strength” of all the options for bedding materials available to the chimps. So chimps go for mattresses with some give, but ones that are also stable and firm. (kindle loc 2380)

One interesting conclusion is that stiff beds don't actually do as well as medium beds for providing good sleep, which is counter intuitive. The author spends a half chapter pointing out that you can tell which parts of the bodies are maladapted for modern living by looking at medical schools. For instance, dentists don't go to medical school because the demand is so high that society puts dentists directly to dental school. The same goes for podiatrists.

 Any anatomical area that needs its own entire branch on the medical tree clearly troubles a great number of people, as we saw with all the problems covered in the first section of the book. (kindle loc 1714)

The final part of the book covers our reproductive dysfunction:

 Dogon women experience, on average, roughly 100 total menstrual cycles in their lifetimes (the mean in the study was 109 and the median was 94) and birth, on average, 8.6 children. Those numbers are strikingly different from what women experience who are not practicing natural fertility. Strassmann estimates, based on data from other researchers, that it is not unusual for modern American women to go through as many as 400 menstrual cycles in their lifetimes. (kindle loc 2568)

An interesting section covers why women menstruate at all. For one thing, the relationship between fetus and the woman's body isn't a completely friendly one:

 Horse and pig fetuses, for example, do not burrow very aggressively into the womb. The membranes surrounding the fetus are several layers of tissue removed from the maternal blood supply. There is still maternal–fetal conflict in those species, but not the same degree of conflict seen in species where the fetus digs in further. Dogs and cats are somewhere in the middle. Their fetal tissues start to invade the maternal tissues but are still distanced somewhat from the maternal blood vessels. In the most aggressive version of placentation, the fetus roots in, like a mole into dirt, and snuggles right up against the blood vessels of the mother. You can probably guess which type of fetuses humans ended up with. We got the uberaggressive model. And again, we see the comparative approach pay off in solving this riddle of why SD evolved. The animals that exhibit SD and menstruation are also the ones with the most invasive fetuses. Some scientists think SD evolved as a preemptive degree of protection against a hyperinvasive fetus. The logic goes that a woman gets ahead of the game and builds in some extra protection before the vampire-fetus arrives so that her unborn child does not completely suck her dry. After all, if you know a vampire is coming to your quaint, remote village, it makes sense to start beefing up the defenses of the village before the little bloodsucker gets there. Get the garlic planted, the stakes sharpened, and the mirrors shined in preparation. (kindle loc 2751)

 There's even a great section on why Asians are more prone to diabetes at the same body weight compared to European-Americans.

All in all, it's a fun book, written with humor, and keeps you engaged while reading. Recommended!

Review: How Democracies Die

 How Democracies Die was published in January 2018, two years before the January 6th, 2020 insurrection. I mention this because if you read this book, you're getting a rosy-eyed view of the prospect for American democracy, while a realistic view would note the events after January 6th, and realize that things are far worse than what this book describes.

The book has a major thesis, which is that the main guardrails of democracies isn't the constitution, the institutions, the rule of law, or the practice of elections. The main guardrails are social norms that cause political parties to respect the conventions of a democratic society to practice forbearance, not using every tool available to legally win, but respecting the spirit of elections.

Well, from 2016-2020, the USA elected a norm-breaking president. But the authors point out that even  before Trump, the Republicans have long been on a path to delegitimize the opposition, and are now at a point where any election they didn't win is declared to be fraudulent. If things continue down this path, the authors predict that there's a good chance that an authoritarian takeover of the American government is imminent. The authors point out previous instances in history (such as the events prior to the civil war) of breakdown in society, and point out that the compromises that gave Americans back a civil democracy were achieved by agreeing to deny civil rights to minorities and maintaining white supremacy as the policy for the country.

Is there any hope that American democracy can recover? The authors say yes:

A refounding of America’s major center-right party is a tall order, but there are historical precedents for such transformations—and under even more challenging circumstances. And where it has been successful, conservative party reform has catalyzed democracy’s rebirth. A particularly dramatic case is the democratization of West Germany after the Second World War. At the center of this achievement was an underappreciated development: the formation of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) out of the wreckage of a discredited conservative and right-wing tradition...The rebuilding of German conservatism, of course, followed a major catastrophe. The CDU had no choice but to reinvent itself. The question before Republicans today is whether such a reinvention can occur before we plunge into a deeper crisis. Can leaders muster the foresight and political courage to reorient what has become an increasingly dysfunctional political party before further damage is done, or will we need a catastrophe to inspire the change? (Kindle loc 3122-3148)

I don't know about you, but that slim hope is just grasping at straws. If it took defeat during a major war and having the country divided up by foreign powers to get the German right-wingers to become reasonable people I'm not hopeful for the future.

Well, the book's a downer, but you'd have to be blind and not paying attention if the events of the past few years haven't alarmed you. In that sense the book's well worth reading.

 

Review: Pixel 6

 A variety of circumstances (both security related) led my wife and I to both end up with Pixel 6. First, Boen locked himself out of his Pixel 3a. Due to Factory Reset Protection, the phone became worthless and useless, since even after a factory reset the phone required him to login using his previous screen pattern. This is the well known, "too much security" problem. But BestBuy had a T-mobile Pixel 6 available and was willing to take in the Pixel 3a for a $180 discount on an already $50 discounted Pixel 6, so we ended up with a Pixel 6 for a little more than $400.

My S9+ has served me faithfully for more than 30 months, but the battery had been going downhill. More than that, I was 6 months away from the end of security updates. Prior to working on security, I'd never been a target, but since I now reported into a security organization, I decided to play on the safe side. I would default to one of the latest Galaxy Phones, but in the intervening 2 years, Samsung has seen fit to remove both the headphone jack and the microsd slot on their S models.  They also got rid of MST payments, so you couldn't use the latest phones on mag card readers! The latest one that had a microsd card slot was the Galaxy S21FE, which Arturo had. But over the holidays I couldn't get Samsung to give me a reasonable trade-in value for my S9+, so when Google's store offered me $215, I jumped on it for a 256GB Pixel 6. The Pixel 6 Pro wasn't under consideration because the worst feature of the S9+ was the curved screen. Unfortunately, the experience of trading in at the on-line Google store was much worse than going to Best Buy during a pandemic: it took weeks for Google to even receive the product, and more delays while they evaluated the phone.  They did eventually grant me my $215 trade-in, despite all the horror stories about people turning in a perfect phone only to be denied their credit. Given a choice between a BestBuy trade in and a Google one, the BestBuy trade in is much faster and easier.

There are many web-sites devoted to covering various features of the Pixel 6, but I'll focus on the experience of someone upgrading from a 3 year old phone. First of all, the bluetooth connectivity for the Pixel 6 is definitely far stronger than that on the S9+. I was really surprised by this. On the S9+, I learned to keep the phone in the same side pocket as the headphone ear piece I was using, and even then I'd occasionally get a cut-out when I was cycling. On the Pixel 6, I could put the phone in any pocket I wanted. Inside the house, I could roam far away from the phone and not get it cut out.  The latency between when I inserted by Jabra Elite 65 into my ear and the phone being connected (especially when answering a phone call) is also much faster than the S9+, and makes the experience much better than before, which was a pleasant surprise. The S9+ was also very aggressive about killing apps, so much so that I learned to manually start the audio app I wanted each time I used it. This was despite my S9+ being the 6GB RAM/128GB storage model, another reason I didn't go for the S21FE. By contrast, the Pixel 6 seems very willing to use all 8GB of RAM at its disposal, and auto-resume always correctly picked the right app to resume playing audio from on bluetooth connect, android auto startup, etc.

Lots of people complain about the size of the phone. I actually like a big phone, and the voice recognition on the phone is such that for typical one-handed tasks (like dialing a number) I don't even usually touch the screen. Where that falls over is for switching between audio apps, where sometimes the system will ask me to unlock the phone in order to start an app.

Similarly, it's nice not having any duplicate apps, and having to disable bixby, etc. Size-wise, the phones were actually similarly sized:

The Pixel is actually just a little bit bigger, despite having a much bigger screen, and the OLED display was also significantly brighter. It's unfortunately also heavier and wider, and I feel it in my pocket in ways I didn't feel the S9+. What's not so nice is the fingerprint reader. It works, just takes a little longer than the physical fingerprint reader that was on the S9+. Though again, the latest Samsung phones have also switched to an in display reader!

After I copied over my SD card to the Pixel, I had about 150GB left. Since I'd deliberately not copied any of my photos over, it was clear to me that the 128GB version of the phone would have been too cramped, since just after another month of installing apps and taking photos, I've used already 2GB. Since the base model came with 108GB free and I'm already using 108GB, I'd say that if you have the habit of using an SD card with older model phones, the base model is insufficient for daily use, let alone an extended period of travel, where you might download videos and shoot a lot of photos and videos while traveling. I immediately turned off Google Photos sync installed Amazon photos and got my already-paid-for unlimited full resolution storage. Google photos have very nice features, but none of them justify paying for cloud storage. By the way, if you run your phone at 100% capacity, you're going to wear out the storage system faster, since wear leveling partly depends on having free space for the leveling to happen!

In terms of interaction, the phone behaves much faster than the S9+. In particular, there's much shorter lag time when I double-press the power button to bring the camera up. This is a big deal since a major use case for the smartphone camera is the ability to shoot while cycling, and the less time you're riding with the camera pointing at a scene/action while trying to get a picture the better. Despite all the raves about high refresh 90Hz screens, I did not actually notice any difference in day to day use. In fact, I've turned off the 90Hz screen so I get better battery life since I didn't notice it at all. (Incidentally, this is one reason I decided I could live without a zoom --- when you're looking for a camera to use while riding a bike you don't need a zoom!)

By far the best feature of the Pixel phone, however, are the features related to voice and phone calls. I spend a lot of time waiting on the phone on hold. I tried hold for me and it worked. Then the next few times I got phone calls from someone I didn't know, I tapped the "screen my call" button, and the spam caller hung up (which let me know to immediately block the number!). When calling an automated dialing system, "direct my call" popped up and I got a transcription of the phone menu. I know I'm probably the last person to actually use telephones to make phone calls, but these 3 features alone were well worth switching over to a new phone for.

OK. Everyone raves about how good Pixel photos are. But what I notice about most reviewers is that they review the photo directly on the phone's screen, instead of looking them on a big 4K monitor. Phones have great screens, because that's what sells phones. But camera manufacturers sell cameras to photographers, so they save money on the bill of materials by putting in a relatively cheap screen. So if you compare a dedicated camera and a smartphone side by side when you take photos, you're going to think, "The phone shoots so much better photos than my dedicated camera. Computational photograph for the win!" But after you get home and look at the photos on a large 4K screen, you'll discover, as I did, that the dedicated camera is quite obviously better than the smartphone, even without fancy multi-frame HDR software pinning technology. Keep in mind that a 12 megapixel image (like that from the Pixel 6) is only barely good enough for a 4K monitor. Any improvements in monitor resolution will make it very clear that "barely good enough" in 2022 will no longer be good enough in 2026. In any case, I've on occasion been impressed by a Pixel photo, but for any kind of travel, or even routine capture, I've never regretted pulling out my Ricoh GR3 or EOS M5. Most of the photographs you'll see on my travel comes from a real camera, not a smartphone.

One particularly bad feature of the Pixel 6 is the panorama mode. I usually expect panorama mode to at least produce a higher resolution file than the non-pano shots. But the panorama mode on the Pixel 6 not only produces awful results, but stores the same resolution as a single picture. The results are awful and not worth your time. Better take individual shots and stitch them with hugin or Lightroom.

The quick UI for the phone works, and works fast: double-tap on the power button to activate the camera, and then shoot using the volume down button. The counter-intuitive part is that if you hold down the volume down button, instead of shooting in burst mode like a real camera, it starts shooting video instead! There's no way to reconfigure the phone to use burst mode, so I've learned to make do. In theory you can export frames from the video, but that's a total pain --- you have to use the Google Photos app and export the frames.

Pixel phones come with a voice assistant that's supposedly leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, especially since supposedly the Tensor processor on the phone is designed for language processing. In practice, the hardware can't live up to the software --- frequently it'd miss the wake word, or I'd have to say "stop" a couple of times before the timer stopped, for instance. Despite training the language model, it misunderstands me a lot more often than I would like, and using the voice assistant via bluetooth headset frequently annoys me with the "you have to unlock your phone before you use this feature." The entire point of a voice assistant is that the phone stays in my pocket while I talk to it. Transcription accuracy is also not much improved, though transcription speed is now quite good. The lack of sensitivity of the microphone is also highlighted in another instance: I watched Hamilton while the phone was sitting on the couch, and the "Now Playing History" feature of the phone remembered every song that was in that musical. But the next day, I saw When Marnie Was There with the phone in my pocket, and the phone had no memory of the ending theme song.

The Pixel 6 comes with guaranteed OS updates until October 2024, and security updates until October 2026. That's a good window, ensuring that you're likely to trade in the phone long before that happens. (More than likely, the phone would have been broken or stolen before then) I don't usually care about software updates --- frequently, the UI changes just so someone can get a promotion, but the security updates are welcome, and obviously there will be bugs that I'd like to see fixed, as well as possible improvements in voice recognition and other tweaks to eliminate annoyances such as the need to unlock the phone for certain activities that voice assistant should just take care of.

For the prices we paid with the excellent trade-in values we got, this was a good phone. I'm still very annoyed that Samsung got rid of headphone jacks and micro-sd cards, which is how I ended up with the Pixel 6 (the Samsung A  series phones still have those features, but they weren't offering good trade-in values so we ended up paying less for the Pixel 6 than we would have for the A52 5G, which had a much worse camera and of course Samsung bloatware). Now that the holidays are over, you're likely to see even better deals for the Pixel 6, and if you find a good deal, it's worth taking a look at it. All in all, this is the first Pixel non-A phone that struck me as being good value compared to their Samsung counterparts, so it's also the first full on Pixel non-A phone that I would tag the recommended label on.

Review: The Genetic Lottery - Why DNA matters for Social Equality

 The Genetic Lottery is a book about the social and research implications of gene studies and research. It sets out to defend gene studies primarily from a scientist and ethics point of view, mostly from the perspective of a researcher whose work has frequently been lumped in with the eugenics movement, which has long cast a shadow over genetics research. Along the way, she provides lots of information and interesting things to think about that I hadn't seen before. For instance:

As of 2019, people of European descent made up only 16 percent of the global population but accounted for nearly 80 percent of GWAS participants. This situation is not improving, despite the falling cost of genotyping. In the last five years, the share of genetics research focused on people of European ancestry has held steady, even as the overall number of genotyped people continues to explode. genetics research does not just disproportionately study White people. It also is disproportionately conducted by White people. The collection and analysis of genetic data from populations of non-European ancestry thus presents a double bind. Without conducting genetic research with the entire global population, there is a danger that genetic knowledge will only benefit people who are already advantaged.(Kindle Loc 1544-1546)

Harden presents the concept of a polygenic index very early on in the book, basically explaining it as an index of a constellation of genes that gives rise to a complex attribute such as height, IQ, and executive function EF.  The important property of these polygenic indices is that they measure composite complex attributes,  so they're difficult to manipulate. So there's a polygenic index for education, and there's one for wealth, and there's one for executive function. What's interesting is how early these genetic effects kick in:

the education polygenic index is correlated with whether children start talking before age 3 and their scores on IQ tests at age 5.12 So, consistent with what was observed in bioannotation and twin studies, polygenic index analyses suggest that, whatever genes are doing to influence educational inequalities, they are doing it early in life—with effects that are apparent before children ever begin school.... General EF is as heritable as eye color or height, more heritable than BMI or pubertal timing.14 (Kindle Loc 2479-2502)

 Harden points out several things about polygenic indices. First of all, they're not comparable between population subgroups. In other words, if you're not white, the studies that are published currently cannot be used to predict anything about you. Secondly, the genes might do something, but the environment matters. For instance, before women were allowed to go to college, the polygenic index for educational attainment was very weak for women (duh!):

For my grandmother’s birth cohort (people who were born in 1939–1940), the polygenic index was more weakly related to educational attainment among women than among men. (These women were in their thirties before my alma mater, the University of Virginia, admitted students without regard to gender, in 1972.) But this gender difference has narrowed over time: as educational opportunities for women increased, the polygenic index has become more strongly associated with women’s educational outcomes. For woman in my birth cohort (people born in 1975-1982), the polygenic index is as strongly associated with education as it is for men. Genetics, ironically, has become a sign of gender equality. (kindle loc 2761)

What this means is that it doesn't matter how heritable something is, if the gene finds itself in an environment where it cannot express itself. So for instance:

 Despite the mythology of the United States as the “land of opportunity,” it has lower social mobility than many other countries; Denmark is an example of a country with high social mobility. The heritability of educational attainment is actually lower in countries with lower social mobility, like the United States and Italy...the heritability of child cognitive ability is lowest for children raised in poverty and highest for children from rich homes—particularly in the US, where social safety nets for poor families are weaker than in other countries (kindle loc 2773-2779)

 She goes on to reveal that wealthy students in the lowest quartile of the educational attainment polygenic index still graduate college at higher rates than students in the highest quartile of polygenic index from the impoverished social classes. What this means is that there's a ton of un-realized human potential amongst the poorest students in the country, and that the genetic influence on education is still outweighed by the effects of poverty.

Harden then goes on to argue that attempting to do intervention in education, etc without the benefits of insights from genetic research is fruitless. For instance, there's an oft-cited study of how babies whose parents speak more words to them do better in school. But that sort of correlation doesn't mean anything. She claims that rolling out expensive educational policy blindly without any sort of understanding of how the genetic influences work is unsustainable and lead to failure. Most educational interventions do in fact fail.

Where Harden falls down, however, is that she states near the end of the book that we do know what works. Universal healthcare, for instance, would eliminate a lot of the immiseration and suffering and poverty that causes poor performance amongst students. Similarly, eliminating hunger amongst children through food-stamps or poverty reduction programs directly help those students. So in the very last chapter of the book she under-mined her entire thesis! It's very clear that the progressive programs that are considered "far-left-wing" in the USA (while being solidly in the center-right in most developed countries) do not need further research in genetics, cohort studies, or eugenics programs in order to be successful. We already know how to do them, we just have never had the poliltical will to do them.

But you know what, I'm going to give Harden credit for this. Very few people (scientists or otherwise), will admit that the problem they're applying for research funding for has already been solved. And her book contains many good examples of how targetted intervention for kids with say, ADHD or other disabilities shouldn't be considered any differently than giving kids with myopia glasses to see better with. So on the whole I still think her book is worth reading.

Review: Cycorldpro Multi-Pocket Hiking Shorts #9

 I've been using the Columbia Trail Splash shorts for daily wear, but for weekend mountain biking, don't use them because they're missing belt loops. I use some pretty old shorts for that purpose, but they're neither lightweight nor really comfortable, so when slickdeals pointed me at a sale on Cycorldpro's Multi-Pocket Outdoor Hiking Shorts for $16 each, I bought two pairs.

The web-site for the purchase is horrible, with the paypal receipt going to some individuals rather than a company, so you know it's run by somebody as a side-hustle. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The shorts, when they arrived, clearly adhere to the "belt-and-suspenders" approach to clothing design. Not only are there buttons and zippers in addition to the belt loops, there's also (unpictured) an internal drawstring that you can tie so even if you didn't want to use a belt, the shorts would be perfectly fitted.

As advertised, there were pockets galore, two on each side (ample enough to fit a Pixel 6), one on each thigh (one with a zipper, and one with a velcro fastener), and one zippered rear pocket. The shorts are lightweight enough, and very comfortable to mountain bike with with liners and a belt. (Incidentally, the belt is essential for the Spider Holster, which is still my favorite way of carrying a camera) After a muddy ride the shorts cleaned off quickly and easily, and dried easily.

For day to day wear on a sailboat or when I don't need to carry a camera in "quickdraw" mode, I still prefer the Trail Splash. But for weekend mountain biking or hiking trips where I'm going to want a camera at ready these are the ticket. Recommended.

Review: The Dawn of Everything

 The Dawn of Everything comes with the subtitle A New History of Humanity. It stands proudly against books such as Sapiens and their glib, linear exposition of the dawn of civilization. Set against that, is that the book seems determined to be make its points obscure and as incomprehensible and incoherent as possible, so it's going to be a tough job to summarize its main points (since the authors seem unwilling or unable to write clearly!). But I'll try anything.

The book sets the stage by writing that the initial meetings of civilizations between the Western European cultures and the North American cultures were nothing like what is depicted in popular culture. For one, Europeans who lived amongst the native Americans would frequently go native, having discovered that the native American way of living was much less oppressive than the European society of the time. This persists even into the 1900s:

For two decades, Valero lived with a series of Yanomami families, marrying twice, and eventually achieving a position of some importance in her community. Pinker briefly cites the account Valero later gave of her own life, where she describes the brutality of a Yanomami raid.26 What he neglects to mention is that in 1956 she abandoned the Yanomami to seek her natal family and live again in ‘Western civilization,’ only to find herself in a state of occasional hunger and constant dejection and loneliness. After a while, given the ability to make a fully informed decision, Helena Valero decided she preferred life among the Yanomami, and returned to live with them.27 Her story is by no means unusual. The colonial history of North and South America is full of accounts of settlers, captured or adopted by indigenous societies, being given the choice of where they wished to stay and almost invariably choosing to stay with the latter. (Kindle Loc 460)

By contrast, Amerindians incorporated into European society by adoption or marriage, including those who – unlike the unfortunate Helena Valero – enjoyed considerable wealth and schooling, almost invariably did just the opposite: either escaping at the earliest opportunity, or – having tried their best to adjust, and ultimately failed – returning to indigenous society to live out their last days.  (Kindle Loc 471)

 Some emphasized the virtues of freedom they found in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth.31 Others noted the ‘Indian’s’ reluctance ever to let anyone fall into a condition of poverty, hunger or destitution. It was not so much that they feared poverty themselves, but rather that they found life infinitely more pleasant in a society where no one else was in a position of abject misery (Kindle Loc 486)

The common arguments were that such societies were primitive and poor, and that the price of egalitarianism and equality and freedom was poverty. The authors take various attacks against these common arguments, with varying success. The most effective argument they had was that it was clear that these tribal societies, far from being primitive and unthinking, had actually constructed their societies with deliberation and thinking.  In one particular account, a Wendat man frequently met with various French and Jesuit settlers and was judged a brilliant thinker and speaker of eloquence:

Some Jesuits went further, remarking – not without a trace of frustration – that New World savages seemed rather cleverer overall than the people they were used to dealing with at home (e.g. ‘they nearly all show more intelligence in their business, speeches, courtesies, intercourse, tricks, and subtleties, than do the shrewdest citizens and merchants in France’).26 Jesuits, then, clearly recognized and acknowledged an intrinsic relation between refusal of arbitrary power, open and inclusive political debate and a taste for reasoned argument. (Kindle Loc 971)

Thus the puzzle the authors pose is as follows: we know from lots of research that the adoption of cereal agriculture was one of the biggest mistakes humanity as a species could have made. Hunter/foragers had way more free time than the Western Farmers who invaded North America. So how did human beings (who were as smart then as we are today) fall into the trap of making their own lives worse? The traditional argument is the economic one: cereal agriculturist couples could produce a child every 2 years, compared to the hunter forager band who would produce one every 3-5 years. But of course, nobody says, "I will suffer and make my life much worse so that 5 generations from now my descendants will win!"

The argument the authors make in this book are as follows:

1. Many impressions of primitive cultures are wrong. For instance, throughout North America, different clans would occupy the same villages, and despite long distances you would find the same totem animals in use. This strongly suggested that many native Americans could travel far and wide.
2. The basic unit was not the family. It suggested that early humans have always lived in a somewhat virtual existence, where they could always move with their feet in if they didn't want to be told what to do:

The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do. (Kindle Loc 2628)

Even within cities that were built, leader selection was deliberate as opposed to the modern charismatic politician we expect to see today:

Those who aspired to a role on the council of Tlaxcala, far from being expected to demonstrate personal charisma or the ability to outdo rivals, did so in a spirit of self-deprecation – even shame. They were required to subordinate themselves to the people of the city. To ensure that this subordination was no mere show, each was subject to trials, starting with mandatory exposure to public abuse, regarded as the proper reward of ambition, and then – with one’s ego in tatters – a long period of seclusion, in which the aspiring politician suffered ordeals of fasting, sleep deprivation, bloodletting and a strict regime of moral instruction. The initiation ended with a ‘coming out’ of the newly constituted public servant, amid feasting and celebration.63 Clearly, taking up office in this indigenous democracy required personality traits very different to those we take for granted in modern electoral politics. On this latter point, it is worth recalling that ancient Greek writers were well aware of the tendency for elections to throw up charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. (Kindle Loc 6890)

The authors spend chapter upon chapter arguing that essentially, historians/sociologists and other academics have been guilty of cherry picking their evidence to suit their arguments, that entire eons of history and civilizations that didn't exhibit the modern predilection to strict control, inequality,  and brutal control of humans were simply ignored or not studied. They pointed out that even in many cultures where the "King" was considered a god, couldn't command anyone who wasn't in direct earshot, and that there's a lot of evidence that in many such cultures, most people would chose to live a conveniently far distance from the king.

what happens if we accord significance to the 5,000 years in which cereal domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage, rather than just the 5,000 in which it did? What happens if we treat the rejection of urban life, or of slavery, in certain times and places as something just as significant as the emergence of those same phenomena in others? In the process, we often found ourselves surprised. We’d never have guessed, for instance, that slavery was most likely abolished multiple times in history in multiple places; and that very possibly the same is true of war. Obviously, such abolitions are rarely definitive. (Kindle Loc 10099)

 I'm not a historian, archaeologist, or academic, so I have no rubric to judge the evidence or understand the believability of what they're saying. What is clear though, is that the native American Indians were given far less credit for bringing the concepts of freedom, individuality, and democracy to Western civilizations than most people would give them today, and that many societies today would do well to consider that the strictures that govern them need not be taken for granted. If the book was better written, its points would be clearer, but it makes very good points. I can't say this book wasn't a slog, but the ideas in it were valuable and interesting. Recommended.

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.