Review: The Sandman (Season 1)

 I don't have a Netflix subscription so I didn't watch The Sandman when it debuted on Netflix. Between when it debuted and when I was about to cave and subscribe just to watch it, the local library flagged it as being ready for pickup by me!

I thought Tom Sturridge made for a great Morpheus, getting the expressions right, especially the glare he had when he was trapped in the prison. I enjoyed the recasting of Lucifer as Gwendoline Christie. I enjoyed the rewriting of John Constantine as Johanna Constantine. I thought Kirby Howell Baptiste wasn't perky enough for a depiction of the best representation of Grandmother Death in literature.

So the cast was great. The look was good, but given the amount of money spent on the series ($15M per episode) I found myself wondering whether various people were lining their pockets unduely. I expected jaw dropping visuals and those were far and few between. It didn't look like a $15M per episode series.

In general, I liked the story changes such as making Lyta and Hector no longer being former super-heroes. I thought that rather than "A Dream of A Thousand Cats" they should have depicted the story of Nada instead, but those are rather minor. For instance, I thought the Hob Gadling episode didn't add much back when it was a comic book series and don't think much of it now.

I'm very glad that the showrunner chose to do the series at a fairly brisk pace, approximately 2-3 issues per episode. Would I pay for a Netflix subscription to watch it? Sure. Would I go out of my way to watch it? Probably not, despite being a massive Sandman fan. What the show did tell me though is that while reading the books, I thought that the short stories (A Dream of A Thousand Cats, for instance) were much better than the longer story arcs, in a TV show the longer story arcs made for much better depiction.

If you've never read the Sandman the show is definitely worth watching. In this case, the TV show is almost (if not quite) as good as the book.

Review: Machine Vendetta

 Machine Vendetta is the recently released Alastair Reynolds novel feature Prefect Dreyfus. As far as I can tell it's the last book in the trilogy featuring the Panoply and the Glitter Band in the Revelation Space universe. It's the first book in recent years that no longer has a jacked up kindle price since before Apple got involved in price fixing with various publishers, and at $9.99 I used some of my kindle credits and didn't bother with waiting for the library.

The plot revolves around the murder of two prefects, both previously exemplary, performing what seems to be suicidal acts. One of them is Ingvar Tench, a close friend of Tom Dreyfus, and she turns out to have a previously unknown daughter! This is by far the weakest part of the plot, requiring the rest of the police force to believe that she had a daughter at an improbable time while devoting unlimited time to her career.

The rest of the plot is great. We have battling AIs vying for dominance over humanity, a final resolution to the plot of the first novel in the series, lots of police procedural work in addition to the exciting action-filled betrayals and crisis. This book could be turned into a high budget science fiction movie and it would be fun to watch.

Alastair Reynolds is in my auto-buy list. The science in his science fiction is great, his characters are much more 3-dimensional than you would expect from science fiction, and while he has plot weaknesses if you can get over them the reading is just compelling. I finished this book over 3-4 days and it was fun!

Recommended!

Review: Road Holland Utrecht Wool Jersey

 I'm a cheapskate about clothing, and usually pick up cheap cycling jerseys for about $20/pop whenever they go on sale. People rave about Wool Jerseys, but I never found them practical: you can't toss them in the dryer, they take forever to dry when you're touring and have no access to a laundry machine, and obviously, in California they're not useful for about 3 seasons out of the year.

Someone on an internet mailing list put up his Utrecht Wool Jerseys that were in my size for $50 and threw in a Walz cycling cap as well. For that price I couldn't resist. I figured I'd wear them in winter, and save my $20 summer jerseys for summer touring. When they arrived I was impressed by how nice they were. Online research show that they're not 100% wool, but a 39/61 merino/poly blend. The jerseys fit well and aren't scratchy, though the pockets show a disturbing tendency to unfurl when you take something out of them.

For washing, I throw them into the washing machine on "delicate" and put in some Eucalan. Then I air dry them. It's unlikely this will work when touring but I have no intention of using these jerseys while touring, when days might hit 100F. I discovered that these jerseys work well around 40-70F. I've had days on top of black mountain when people who're all bundled up with gear ask me how the heck I'm possibly warm wearing a short sleeve. About 70F they start to feel a bit too warm, and no way am I wearing these in 80F.

They do make me look fat, but that's only because as my kids will tell you, that I am fat!

So far, they've shown no signs of shrinking, and are nice enough that when I wear them in the office nobody immediately points out that they're cycling jerseys, not office wear. No way am I paying their original full price (which must have been $100 or more), but at $25 they were well worth it for California winters. I can definitely see how the company went out of business but if you see them in good condition they're worth a look.

Review: Narrative Economics

 I'm a huge Robert Shiller fan, but somehow missed that he had a new book called Narrative Economics. When someone at work mentioned it, I checked it out from the library right away and read it. The book's thesis is that economists spend too much time analyzing models like interest rates but should consider ideas and stories going viral and thus causing economic events.

To back this up, the book actually goes out and proposes several different narratives/stories that could have created/prolonged the great depression. The stories all seem rather plausible but there's no proof whatsoever that these stories had massive impact. Even worse, there's no guidance as to how you could have used the stories to predict what had happened.

This book more than anything else, proved to me that if you actually want to do investing, numbers are the way to go. What a surprising waste of time.

Review: The Fund

 The Fund is Rob Copeland's take down of Ray Dalio.  Ray Dalio is the founder/owner of Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund that purportedly had a phenomenal track record of beating the market, and Dalio himself became a celebrity, writing Principles, which was actually quite a good book, and follow on books that I thought was awfully fawning of a Chinese authoritarian system that was probably more about talking up Dalio's Chinese corporate/personal investment portfolio than based on reality.

I expected an account of Ray Dalio's rise and perhaps some expose of the secret sauce behind Bridgewater Associates, but to be honest the entire book was expose. There's an early section on Ray Dalio's background and how he got rich (hint: marry a wealthy person!), but the sections on how he managed to get pension funds to give him money to manage were given short shrift, as was the heuristics/algorithms he used to become successful early on.

Most of the book focuses on post-success, where the principles he espoused actually got turned into a horrible nightmarish social-network based pile-on app used inside the company. This mechanism was made worse by Dalio rejecting any criticism of it and taking on the form of the final arbiter. What really astonished me was that Dalio was selling pieces of Bridgewater to his own employees through an employer-financed loan. His second in command therefore was living a hand-to-mouth lifestyle:

Over just three years, 2011, 2012, and 2013, industry researcher Alpha reported that he made $815 million in total. While just a fraction of Dalio’s compensation, it was also enough to vault Jensen onto the industry lists of the highest-paid hedge fund managers—he made more than most of those who ran their own firms. Only a handful of people knew, however, another reason for him to stay. The Bridgewater founder had concocted a complicated arrangement in which the more money that Jensen seemed to make, the more he actually owed. Dalio had challenged Jensen, as a condition of the younger man’s employment, to slowly buy out the Bridgewater founder’s ownership. Jensen didn’t have nearly enough money, so Bridgewater lent it to him—essentially transferring slivers of his ownership each year, building up a gigantic IOU to the hedge fund’s majority shareholder, who just so happened to be Dalio. Jensen’s debt skyrocketed as the value of Bridgewater rose. When Dalio sold a piece of the firm to the Texas teachers’ pension fund, not only his own stake was impacted. Since Bridgewater was now worth more, it made Jensen’s own tithe that year even more expensive as well. (kindle loc 2926)

This seems like a particularly bad deal, and poorly negotiated for his employees while enriching himself, hardly the "principled" man Dalio like to style himself. The various shenanigans surrounding sexual harassment was just as bad though perhaps all too common in the age of "me-too" revelations to raise too many eyebrows.

What surprised me in the book was that Dalio was perpetually pessimistic about the US economy. We know that over the last 50 years, the US stock market has been on an incredible bull run, and anyone betting consistently against it should have been wiped out, but apparently his algorithms worked even when he was pessimistic his funds were still doing well. His pessimistic outlook also meant that he loved autocrats:

Since the late 1980s, Dalio had been convinced that the United States was in an inextricable fall, not merely economically, but culturally. He saw U.S. politics as on a slow descent into unproductive squabbling, a journey that could end in nothing less than another civil war. At times, he called himself “an economic doctor,” with the prescription to fix all that. In place of U.S. hegemony, Dalio looked for a better blueprint abroad. He seemed particularly smitten with societies ruled by powerful autocrats. Thanks to Bridgewater’s long history of managing money for Singapore’s government-run funds, Dalio became friends with Lee Kuan Yew. The elder man, who served as Singapore’s prime minister for a staggering thirty-one years, was a controversial figure whose long tenure achieved stability for his nation at the cost of freedom. Lee governed through what was essentially one-party rule, restricting freedom of speech and dismissing the value of democracy...Over dinner at Dalio’s New York apartment shortly before the Singaporean leader’s death, the men discussed the best models among world leaders. Lee gave an unlikely answer in a posh Manhattan setting: Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader, Lee said, had stabilized Russia after the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union. To Dalio, the analogy would have been seamless. He, too, had stabilized Bridgewater after a tumultuous stretch. (kindle loc 3476-3487)

 The book also covered the gross mismanagement of top talent that Dalio had hired for Bridgewater, including Jon Rubinstein and David Ferruci, both of which wanted nothing to do with Dalio's "Dot Connect" app but were roped into doing them anyway. Rubinstein in particular complained about Dalio's Principles, which wasn't the clean version he espoused in his book but an unwieldy, constantly changing giant ass book:

Once Dalio caught word that his new prized hire had struggled in boot camp, he asked for some time to chat. Rubinstein, cognizant of everything he’d learned about the Bridgewater founder’s love of raw honesty, decided to tell Dalio what was on his mind: “You’ve got three hundred and seventy-five Principles. Those aren’t principles. Toyota has fourteen principles. Amazon has fourteen principles. The Bible has ten. Three hundred and seventy-five can’t possibly be principles. They are an instruction manual.” (kindle loc 3723)

 The book covers the years of Bridgewater's underperformance perfunctorily --- there's an offhand suggestion that once computers became powerful enough and the rest of wall street started hiring up quants and computer scientists to do stock market analysis, Dalio's heuristics no longer offered a competitive edge and instead started to underperform the market. At this point apparently a lot of the money being managed is coming out of new rubes in totalitarian countries where Dalio has managed to cultivate sufficient contacts to have an information advantage with which to make investments, and even those aren't sufficient.

Take downs are fun to read, and this one was compelling. While Principles was good reading in theory, as usual in practice the implementation is more than a little tricky, and Dalio's success had nothing to do with his principles but a matter of being early enough and lucky enough to have money fall into his lap in big chunks (marry rich and be a good salesman). I'm much reminded of Google's promotion committees and how despite the high sounding principles only succeeded in making Google's promotion system even more political than the traditional manager-led promotion system. It's worth reading this book after reading Principles. It also explains why Dalio is such a China-supporter and all I can say is that the business/popular press loving to lionize businessman billionaires from Steve Jobs to Rockefeller to Elon Musk has a lot to do with the worst things happening to society today.

Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium Four

 The Walking Dead Compendium Four is the last volume in the series. In this volume, the story has Rick Grimes' collection of 4 communities link up with a much larger one called The Commonwealth. The contrast between a class-based hierarchy and the much more egalitarian society that Grimes had established also parallels the much wealthier and larger commonwealth.

This contrast doesn't make a lot of sense. For instance, the commonwealth is depicted as having body armor, and specialists (including having lawyers as professions that they're in dire need of), but yet seems lacking in innovation, as Eugene, one of Rick's friends from way back in volume one is able to make locomotives work with relative ease.

In addition, we never get much of a backstory of the Commonwealth's formation and rise, which again makes zero sense --- so a couple of high class aristocrats take control once they get involved and everybody else goes along?

OK, so the story behind the series never made much sense anyway. But the action and characters? They're mostly good. We get a colorful loner who somehow managed to survive on her own and yet happily encounters Rick Grimes' group to meet the commonwealth. And for whatever reason the much larger Commonwealth never has had to deal with a huge herd before? The setup felt fake and quite rushed.

Nevertheless, Kirkman redeems himself by giving Rick Grimes a fitting sendoff and a beautiful epilogue that's got surprises, interesting twists (though again, not very believable --- it's hard to imagine a single generation being able to restore safety to the point where few people have seen a Zombie, especially since early on in the series Kirkman makes a point out of noting that even dying of natural causes would turn you into a zombie, and in any reasonably sized city at least one person would die every day), and fine resolutions for many of the characters we've gotten to know.

In any case it was compelling reading and made me put other books on whole while I zipped through it. Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium Three

 The Walking Dead Compendium Three continues Rick Gimes' story of post apocalyptic survival.  This volume features a conflict with a "protection racket" governance regime along with the "whisperer" gang. The former forces Rick to build an alliance to overthrow the tyrant Negan, but at the last minute he uncharacteristically lets Negan lives. What I can say is that some of the characters do grow and develop and we see constant action as well as the humans starting to learn how to cope with the zombies in an intelligent way (though again, I'm just surprised that nobody learns how to drive a tank or even mount automatic weapons on SUVs or jeeps).

The whisperer gang seems much less plausible to me. Living amongst the zombies by wearing their skins on your face seems like a recipe for getting all sorts of skin infection and/or other diseases (dead human bodies are toxic/poisonous to living humans, which is one reason we bury our dead or burn them), so it seems unlikely that any group adopting that survival tactic would survive long enough to pose a threat to the living.

The art is good, and the action never stops. It's quite clear that the series is turning into an exploration of various crisis governance regimes, and Kirkman is always happy to put all his characters into the wringer. I can see why the TV show based on the book would be incredibly popular. Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium 2

 The Walking Dead Compendium Two continues with the story from the first book. The post apocalyptic story as always is pretty unrealistic. For instance, the group encounters a different community that then attacks them. That community has a freaking tank. One tank basically can make short work of any number of zombies just by running over them. You don't even have to fire your guns (though I will note that most tanks also have machine guns in addition to the main cannon). But what do these humans do? Instead of using the tank as a lawn mower to take out all the zombies, they use them to attack other humans? And since the US military has lots of tanks how did the zombies take over in the first place? None of that is explained, because it can't be.

OK. Let's take the story for what it is, which is a tale of survival. What will humans do to  ensure their survival? And after they've compromised themselves ethically, is what's left still human? One of my friends told me that after time as a refugee and watching what people have had to do to survive, they have a hard time readjusting to normal society. I can believe that's true. But on the other hand, when the nature of the threat is so obvious (we're not talking about invisible microbes here), I'm not sure that humans (especially in the small groups depicted in the comic book series --- none of the groups depicted go above Dunbar's number) wouldn't naturally form alliances for protection rather than try to fight each other instead over the scraps. After all, if 90% of the population has turned into zombies, what's left is enough to feed the remaining population for at least 10 years (and probably more given that the average lifespan took a dramatic drop!)

But instead what we get is hostility between human tribes over and over again, even in the face of an immediate zombie threat. And when the protagonist (Rick Grimes) finally decides that humanity can do a lot better if large groups of people cooperate and work together it's treated as an unbelievable epiphany. Of course, all through the pandemic I was convinced that this sort of cooperation is precisely what American society isn't capable of doing, which was why the USA was uniquely hard hit by COVID-19.

But when I think about it, even that's an aberration --- American society did cooperate in the 1940s to defeat its opponents. It could very well be that the current situation is what happens leading up to a crisis. Regardless, the book is still compelling reading because Kirkman is good at stacking one crisis on top of another and moving events along. That ability makes the book never boring, and characters change in permanent ways. Heck of a lot better than many prose novel series I've seen in recent years. Recommended.

Review: The Time-Crunched Cyclist

 With a power meter handy in on my bike I decided to once again try to read a book about serious training to see if I could motivate myself to get stronger for this summers' tour. The Time Crunched Cyclist came up with a web search, and well, with 2 kids, a job, I figured I might qualify under that rubric. For grins, I also checked out the latest edition of The Cyclist's Training Bible (touted as 100% completely rewritten) to compare.

The theory behind The Time Crunched Cyclist is straight forward. Rather than spend hours and hours on your bike building "base miles", the idea is that you will orient your workouts around higher intensity rides. These rides will feature various mini workouts such as power intervals or steady endurance, or climbing intervals, and the total stress on your body will be sufficient to build fitness. The book comes with a warning that it's a challenging program and you would start racing 8 weeks into the program and be able to hold on to your fitness for about 4 weeks after that. Interestingly, reading this book alongside with The Cyclist's Training Bible was a good idea because the other book explains how it works: the idea is that there's a model of your body's response to exercise: training stress score. A cyclist is supposed to get a certain about of training stress in order to build fitness. You can get the same stress from either a long ride with easy miles or a short ride with high intensity. The model gets you to the same place either way.

The huge difference between the two books is that The Cyclist's Training Bible is all about how to build and optimize your ideal training program. The Time Crunched Cyclist is far easier to use because it dispenses with that and just gives you a pre-cooked program and just tells you to follow it for 8-12 weeks. That way you don't have to think about it. There's even a special program for cyclists who bike to work! By contrast The Cyclist's Training Bible warns you against doing bike commuting --- if you're going to race you have to be serious about it and not ride with friends or do anything silly like that.

OK, the problem with both these books are that they're about how to excel in a one day race. The Time Crunched Cyclist claims to prepare you for a 24 hour MTB race or a grand fondo, but even their special "endurance block" training program never has you riding more than 3 hard days in a row. I looked in the index in The Cyclist's Training Bible for stage race, and found the following:

Preparing for an A event that is a stage race requires a different approach to training. With only a few exceptions, the typical stage races for amateurs last three or four days and include three to five stages. There are a few weeklong stage races, but they are rare... The three primary challenges of such races are being physically and mentally prepared for back-to-back races, managing energy expenditure in daily races, and recovering between stages... I need to warn you, however, that such training is quite risky, especialy for the rider who is not capable of managing high levels of such accumulated stress. It flirts with overtraining. The most vulnerable are novices, juniors, and seniors...For most riders, it's probably best to do no more than 4 consecutive days of such training before taking a much needed break... I call this method of closely spaced workouts over several days "crash training." That name is intended to imply a risk. You're likely to crash and burn by doing this. By that, I mean that all sorts of bad things are likely to happen, including overtraining. (pg 132-133)

So there you go. Not recommended by professionals. Good thing I don't care and generally enjoy myself on multi-day tours lasting 3 weeks.

In any case,  I found The Time Crunched Cyclist easy to use --- in fact, you can program the commuting workouts into your Garmin in very little time. Now performing those workouts are a different story. The power thresholds provided in the book are very narrow. There's a very good chance that while commuting you'll be much more worried about traffic lights, not crashing into errant drivers and pedestrians, and what not rather than staring at the power meter. Definitely something to watch out for. And of course there's no guarantee that the terrain will cooperate! You might find yourself descending just when the workout program calls for a power interval! I don't know how people deal with these structured programs. Even worse, on some weeks the program calls for a "rest day" where you're supposed to drive to work. Not an option for those of us who don't have cars!

I guess I just can't follow these programs. I'll just do what I do, which is to bike kids to school, bike to work, and bike everywhere I can, and just forget about optimizing performance. Nevertheless, the book is comprehensive, has a lot of programs that you can pick and choose from, and more importantly never over-promises. They point out at every step the limitations of the program (namely, you're expected to be able to do well in courses that take less than 3 hours to complete, and you won't be able to hold on to your fitness for more than 4 weeks before needing to back off and recover). Very honest and realistic!

Re-read: The Walking Dead - Compendium 1

 Last year was a year when Boen loved zombies. I enjoyed The Last of Us TV show, though the video game is still too hard for him. Similarly, he tried to watch the first episode of The Walking Dead TV show, but that wasn't compelling enough for him to keep watching. But he loved the comic book. I'd bought it ages ago back when the Google Play Store was trying to actually become a viable for buying books and had DRM free comics for sale. (Nowadays it's too expensive) I picked it up to read.

The premise of the series is kinda hooky. A zombie apocalypse has always seemed to me to be improbable because any pandemic that a small group of poorly-outfitted people can survive would be easily survivable by an organized government (though probably not a very democratic one). The swiftness into which civilization falls apart also doesn't make sense --- even warlords in places like Somalia rarely commit the kind of depravities regularly seen in this book.

Finally, the characters are flawed, regularly making poor decisions (even the lead protagonist in the series who starts off demonstrating how competent he is) that have disastrous consequences.

Set against that is that this is a series where there's non-stop action. Events happen that shake up the status quo almost every chapter, and it's a far call from series like Game of Thrones where entire novels go by where nothing happens. I can see why it turned into a hit TV show with lots of fans (even some Asian parents watched it!). Each chapter leaves you hanging and keeps you wanting to find out what happens next. But of course 10 years later I'd forgotten it all and the events still happen and are shocking.

The black and white art is crisp, clear, and easy to follow and probably not for people who don't have a strong stomach (I can't imagine any of this being done on TV). Hey, anything that can hold my kid's attention through two fat thousand page volume books (he abandoned the series halfway through the 3rd book) has to be recommended.

Review: Determined

 Determined is Robert Sapolsky's book arguing that we have no free will and examining the implications of it. This book is incredibly dense and difficult to read, but the summary of its argument is that essentially there is no mechanism in physics or chemistry to indicate that you and I are nothing more than moist robots. Fundamentally, you're born with the life you have with genes that you have no control over, , under circumstances you have no control over, grow up in childhood where you also have no agency, into an adolescence into which you also have no agency, so why should we expect you to be able to exercise control just because you turned 18?

Intellectually, of course, you might agree with Sapolsky. But the reality is that we see people effect change all the time. As John Douglas in Mindhunter wrote: "I never saw anyone criminally insane feel compelled to exercise his criminality in direct view of a cop." The fact that a habitual lead-footed driver would suddenly ease off his accelerator just because he happened to see a cop indicates that people can choose, and that we can actually help them choose the right thing by providing an environment in which they can effect change. More prosaically, I've had co-workers who effected a whole-scale change in their lifestyle because their doctor told them that they were going to have to go on statins and other high blood pressure medication. The engineer, being an engineer inquired: "Wait, why go to drugs right away? Shouldn't I try lifestyle changes first?" "Lifestyle changes don't work, statistically." came the reply from the doctor. "Gimme 6 months, doc!" And of course, 6 months of hiking with his kids later he had no need of medication. Of course, I recognize that the people I meet in my social life are high functioning adults and unusually capable, but that just tells me that a blanket statement is most likely wrong or at the least unintuitive. 

The rest of the book is an exploration of the implications of this on various parts of society, chiefest of which is the criminal justice system. Once you accept the premise that even the most heinous criminal had no control over his action, your goal is to prevent harm by that defective individual, rather than punish him in the hopes of achieving deterrence. There's good evidence for this --- Finland's justice system is focused much more on preventing recidivism than the US's, and it achieves those goals better than the US policy of putting lots of people in jail. But of course, first you have to be willing to accept the idea that people do what they do because they effectively have no control over their behavior. I'm not sure American society is ready for that or will be ready for it anytime soon.

I don't want to give the impression that the book is not worth reading. I did learn a few interesting things, for instance, about the brain's default network:

One level higher—do entire networks, circuits of neurons, ever activate randomly? People used to think so. Suppose you’re interested in what areas of the brain respond to a particular stimulus. Stick someone in a brain scanner and expose them to that stimulus, and see what brain regions activate (for example, the amygdala tends to activate in response to seeing pictures of scary faces, implicating that brain region in fear and anxiety). And in analyzing the data, you would always have to subtract out the background level of noisy activity in each brain region, in order to identify what was explicitly activated by the stimulus. Background noise. Interesting term. In other words, when you’re just lying there, doing nothing, there’s all sorts of random burbling going on throughout the brain, once again begging for an indeterminacy interpretation. Until some mavericks, principally Marcus Raichle of Washington University School of Medicine, decided to study the boring background noise. Which, of course, turns out to be anything but that—there’s no such thing as the brain doing “nothing”—and is now known as the “default mode network.” And, no surprise by now, it has its own underlying mechanisms, is subject to all sorts of regulation, serves a purpose. One such purpose is really interesting because of its counterintuitive punch line. Ask subjects in a brain scanner what they were thinking at a particular moment, and the default network is very active when they are daydreaming, aka “mind-wandering.” The network is most heavily regulated by the dlPFC. The obvious prediction now would be that the uptight dlPFC inhibits the default network, gets you back to work when you’re spacing out thinking about your next vacation. Instead, if you stimulate someone’s dlPFC, you increase activity of the default network. An idle mind isn’t the Devil’s playground. It’s a state that the most superego-ish part of your brain asks for now and then. Why? Speculation is that it’s to take advantage of the creative problem solving that we do when mind-wandering. (kindle loc 3493)

An argument in favor of day dreaming inside a book telling you that there's no free will and therefore you had no choice when you're day dreaming anyway feels super strange. But there it is. You probably can skip reading this book --- I'm not sure it was worth the effort and it certainly didn't change my mind --- I'm of the firm view that if you accept that you have no control over your life then you will end up with much worse outcome than if you have the view that you're the master of your own destiny. But I suppose if you want to have excuses for your failures this book will provide lots of evidence for you to justify your own foibles!

 

2023/2024 Point Reyes Wildcat Campground - New Year's Eve Backpack

 Ever since we visited Alamere Falls in 2022, I'd been so impressed by Wildcat Campground that I tried  over and over again, succeeding only in September this year for the New Year's Eve slot. Boen wanted to go, and the weather looked reasonable --- right in between two rain storms. I posited that the easiest way to do the backpack was to actually bike down the Bear Valley trail until we weren't allowed to bike any more, then hike to the campground. We'd ridden the whole thing from Five Brooks, but the horse poop at the trailhead and the ruggedness of the ride meant that I'd be pushing the bike most of the way on the return anyway, so I might as well carry a backpack and wear it.

On New Year's Eve, we packed everything we needed into the car, and then drove to Bear Valley Visitor Center. There, I confirmed that leaving our bikes at the bottom of Bear Valley trail overnight wouldn't be a problem, and that I couldn't swap out my Site #7 ticket for a Site #6 as some other person had grabbed it and hadn't relinquished it.

The ride was no big deal but I had to take it extra gingerly because I'd forgotten to bring a hammer to snap close the retaining pin on my ancient Yakima trailer. If I'm going to do more bikepacking in this configuration in the future I'm going to have to buy a new trailer. I stacked the two backpacks together on the trailer and tied it all together with bungee cords. The stability wasn't great but on the other hand it's such a tame trail that my biggest concern was getting the backpacks muddy, hence I wrapped both packs with garbage bags.

The easiest way to Wildcat from Bear Valley was up Glen Camp. We'd bought sandwiches at Point Reyes Station earlier, and half way up the trail was a good place to stop and eat --- I've learned never to let kids eat unless they're hungry. Otherwise, it's a waste of food. Even so, Boen only ate 3/4 of his sandwich.

We met other backpackers exiting the route and they told us to get onto the fire road and just stay on it --- there were alternate routes, but this was the easiest way with a kid in tow. At the junction with the Coast Trail we noticed a bunch of backpackers coming down the trail. I asked for a picture of the two of us and they obliged. Daniel, the group leader had Pixel 8 Pro, and was a pretty friendly guy. They told us that the Coast Trail was pretty, and would take us back to our bikes.

Boen's reaction to the first view of Wildcat Campground this trip was "WOW! That's an amazing campground." He didn't remember our previous trip by bike! We got to the campground and found site #7 perched over the beach, but with only a slight view of the ocean. We pitched our tent and made some hot beverages, and then visited the beach but realized that the tide was still high --- low tide was at 8pm, so we went back and explored. We took a look at Site #6, which was indeed occupied by an Asian couple with a huge antenna setup for AM radio, which looked like it would take a good hour to setup.

The views were incredible. We could see all the way to the Farallons, which surprised me because it was cloudy and once in a while I could see rain showers offshore.

We decided to try our luck again, and went to the beach to discover Daniel's group in the midst of starting a fire. I'd brought a fire permit and fire starter, but they had way more people and were way more motivated. They had a guy finding twigs, other people gathering fire wood for drying, and we could spectate. Daniel was a hard worker, frequently getting onto his hands and knees to nurture the fire.

At 4:15, I'd had enough of waiting and decided that this was our last chance to see Alamere falls before sunset. I set off with Boen and Daniels' group decided that I knew what I was doing, which was a mistake.

I cannot fault the views from the beach. The Golden Hour didn't disappoint. Sandpipers on the beach flittered back and forth, looking for grub, only to take flight when the waves came crashing down. 

We steadily got closer to the Alamere Falls, hut were thwarted at the last segment, where big waves kept crashing against the one rock guarding the actual falls. Two of Daniel's party members just resigned themselves to getting wet and soaked through, but Boen and I settled for an ephemeral fall fairly close to the actual falls themselves.

Those falls didn't exist when we last visited the area, so must have been produced by the most recent series of rains.

By the time we got back to our tent site, it was dark, so we made dinner and ate it by lantern light. I'd forgotten to bring headlamps for both of us, so the whole meal was awkward, with lots of spillage, but Boen really enjoyed his Mountain House Beef Stew. He got cold after dinner, so we hurriedly brushed our teeth and joined Daniel's party for the fire, which was nice and hot!

The stars were out, indicating that our cloud cover was gone. But the tides were still crashing down hard on the beaches, so nobody felt like venturing forth to the waterfall in the moonlight. Boen was too tired to do so anyway, and asked for an early night at 8:00pm.

When morning came, we were both refreshed enough to contemplate taking the long way back to the bike, along the coast trail. We ate a hurried breakfast and packed up and hiked up with wet tents and fly for despite the cloudless sky the humidity was high enough to induce a lot of condensation on the tent.

It didn't even take a quarter mile climbing out of the campground for us to have to shed clothing for we had warmed up plenty despite being in the shade.

Turning off on the Coast trail at 0.8 miles we saw signs for the Bear Valley trail intersection at 2.5 miles. The views became very nice, with the spray off the coast visible even at our distance.

The route took us into forests with mists rising around us, lending the area an ethereal look for us to greet the new year. It being early we saw no one else until we got close to the Bear Valley trailhead, where the views started to become spectacular.

California's distinctive sea stacks, along with a clear blue sky and a calm looking Ocean belying the crashing roar that was our soundtrack the night before reminded me again of how nice it was to live where we lived.

Finally, crossing a bridge, up a tiny hill and we were back on the Bear Valley trail. Just a mile later we were at the bikes, loading them up and headed for home.

There's nothing like the relief of pedaling a nice bike after 5 miles of walking. Even a little pump of the pedals and you're flying up a hill at twice your walking speed.  We had quite a bit of splatter on our clothing and bike by the time we got to the car. But it being New Year's Day, traffic home was non existent and we got home in plenty of time to dry the tent and put it away!

Review: Pixel 8 Pro

 Arturo and Pengtoh have long shifted over to using smartphones for their travel photography, and I've been the last holdout. What caught my eye in 2018 was when my wife produced an absolutely fantastic picture from a Pixel 3a XL:

It was perfectly exposed, and the auto-HDR worked far better than I expected. So 2 years ago we switched entirely to the Pixel 6 for smartphone use mostly because of the camera (and also the good trade-in deals we got). But my brothers bought me a Ricoh GR3 and I kept using it, repairing it twice for damage done to it. My GR3 has had about 17000 exposures behind it and now has dust spots (easily removed by Photoshop's Context Aware Fill, but that's significant work) when stopped down past about f/11.

Over the past few years, I got frustrated by the lack of a built-in zoom on the Pixel 6, but the curved screens on the Pixel 6 Pro and Pixel 7 Pro kept me from upgrading. While I could upgrade my wife to the Pixel 7 with the outstanding Black Friday deal of 2022 ($20 + tax!), I make full use of my 256GB phones and so upgrades are neither cheap nor compelling. When I saw that the Pixel 8 series got a $100 increase in price I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to upgrade despite the now flat screen of the Pixel 8 Pro which is very tempting.

Well, two deals surfaced during the holidays that overcame my reticence. One was the 40% off retail price coupon for being a Gold status Google customer. This one was easy: switch to the 1TB tier for Google one and wait 3 days. I had plenty of Google Rewards credits and no better way to use it, so I did that. The other was the Youtube $125 coupon which stacked with the holiday $200 off promo. So we ended up with 2 Pixel 8 Pros, and the price was very good after the trade-ins for our various existing Pixels. (Google was offering the same price for the phones as they were going on Swappa, which meant that it was better to trade in the phones than to try to sell them on Craigslist!)

Google has actually improved the onboarding experience of new Android phones. Now the transfer from your old phone is wireless. The restoring of apps is dumb though ---> every app you ever installed not gets installed on your new phone, so I went through and deleted all of them. All the authenticator apps now also back up to the cloud, so you no longer have to go through and re-register every account you ever had on your 2FA app.

The first thing I notice were the quality of life issues: the fingerprint reader now worked consistently, and the face unlocked was so fast the first time my wife's phone unlocked with face recognition she thought that the security system was broken! The phone charged faster and used less power. For instance, on a 2 hour drive in the past my Pixel 6 could never charge from 20% to 80%, but now the Pixel 8 Pro will easily go to over 90% for a drive that long! Overnight when not plugged into a charger the Pixel 8 Pro no longer loses more than 5% of its battery at most, and this is with both work and personal accounts sync'd to the phone, as well as the kids' accounts. The phone is fast and smooth, and I no longer felt the need to turn off the high resolution display. I took Boen on a backcountry camping trip in Point Reyes with the phone in airplane mode. At the parking lot, the phone was at 65%. After about 24 hours of biking, hiking, and camping using the phone for photos and running the National Park Service App for maps, I returned to the parking lot with 35% of battery. That's outstanding compared with the Pixel 6 --- I did not have battery saver on, and would occasionally get out of airplane mode to see if I had reception. With the phone at 100% I'd expect to survive a 3 day backpacking trip on airplane mode and being liberal about shooting photos and videos. The bigger battery and lower power draw on the chip obviously made a big difference.

The photos, are of course, the meat and potatoes of the phone. I shot a few photos side by side with the main camera on the phone and the Ricoh GR3:

Ricoh GR3

Pixel 8 Pro

You can see that the GR3 with its stopped down aperture can produce sun stars, while the Pixel 8 Pro suffers from flare. But the exposure and color balance on the Pixel 8 Pro out of the box is just so much better! Here are two more shots, one from the Ricoh GR3 and one from the Pixel 8 Pro's 5x lens.

Ricoh GR3, 28mm uncropped

Pixel 8 Pro 5x telephoto lens

Here, the Pixel 8 Pro clearly has artifacts and an artificialness not present in the GR3 shot. But it's still competitive and the 5x lens grants a better composition. Next, let's compare a cropped GR3 shot to the uncropped 5x Pixel 8 Pro lens.

Ricoh GR3 Cropped

Pixel 8 Pro 5x Telephoto

No question, the GR3 is no longer competitive, no matter what I did in lightroom. The automatic macro mode is also impressive:

The long exposure mode on the camera also lets you get nice waterfall shots

Long Exposure

Original

It's quite clear that computation photography has allowed phone cameras to keep up with dedicated cameras, even ones with APS-C sized sensors like the Ricoh GR3. But that's not all. The dedicated camera makes have made things worse by taking away features that used to be in cameras! For instance, nearly all cameras in the 2000s had GPS chips and stored location data in EXIF, which is absolutely useful for travel photography. No there aren't any high quality cameras that can do that without a badly written app that's going to run on your smartphone instead. (Note that my Nikon W300 does do this, and it's a very nice waterproof camera that I still use!) The lack of weatherproofing also precludes you taking a camera out in the rain.

At this point, I'm willing to stop considering a smartphone to be something for making phone calls, but instead as a waterproof, dustproof camera. In that sense the Pixel 8 Pro has come to displace my dedicated cameras and I will now seriously consider selling my dedicated cameras off.

You cannot beat that as an endorsement. The Pixel 8 Pro is that good.

Review: Built

 Built is Roma Agrawal's book on civil engineering. It won several awards so I started it with fairly high hopes. The book is written in modern "creative non-fiction" style, with lots of personal interjections into various parts of the exposition, which irritated me quite a bit. Do I really care about your initial impressions of your fiance or what you decided to wear while I'm learning about how the Romans used cement?

A lot of the parts of this book are not surprisingly covered better in the great courses series Engineering Lessons and the Lessons they teach  

Review: Steam Deck OLED

 My brothers bought me a Steam Deck OLED as a birthday present.  I remember playing the heck out of the PS Vita back when I bought one, and a device that has access to my entire collection of PC games was exciting.

The worst thing about the Steam Deck is the compatibility. The device runs Linux instead of Windows, and is meant as a platform to sell steam games. I don't have a big steam backlog, and in fact, most of the games I own are on Epic Games due to the large giveaway library. To my surprise, both Epic and GOG installed nicely by my brother functioned really well, to the point where I could play The Witcher 3 and Rise of the Tomb Raider (as well as the original) and to me when I launch both games there's no distinction between them. Other libraries, however (EA Connect and Ubisoft Connect) did not install no matter what I did and time spent tinkering with them was a total waste of time. What's worse, the initial installs of Arkham Asylum and Arkham City failed as well! My brother had to tinker with it, installing different compatibility libraries and in the case of Arkham Asylum deleting and redownloading it to work. My Windows PC has its share of compatibility problems, but not to this extent! For instance, XCOM-2 ran, but I couldn't make a single move!

Cloud saves on Epic Games and GOG didn't work either, so in all cases I had to restart games from scratch. Maybe this is to be expected, but if the device had run Windows I bet it wouldn't have all these problems. (Valve promises that some day they will have fully supported Windows drivers --- I'm not holding my breath --- what incentive do they have to make that work?!!)

The games that work, work well. I happily played The Witcher 3 and Tomb Raider ran well and had an immersive experience. So did the Batman games, once my brother got it running for me. Obviously any of the weaker games (like Braid) would just work as well.  Bluetooth audio connect to my Pixel Buds Pro worked well, and with no discernible latency, which was impressive. One interesting glitch is that the device is very aggressive about awake from sleep. If I pulled out the Pixel Buds Pro within pairing distance of the Steam Deck, it would wake up from sleep! I eventually turned off the Steam Deck completely so as to avoid that.

The battery life was much less impressive. You can get about 120 minutes of either of the triple A titles mentioned above. When connected to the 65w powerbank, you can nearly get through a 6 hour coast to coast flight. That's probably good enough --- my Pixel Buds Pro wouldn't make it past that anyway!

All in all, this is the device that will get me buying games on Steam again. Well done!

Review: The Death of Chaos

 The Death of Chaos continues the saga of Recluce with Lerris' contribution and the end of Justen's story. If you've paid any attention to the magic system behind the series, you'll know that the Death of Chaos automatically also means the Death of Order as well. The story once again revolves around an invasion from an empire, and Lerris's increasingly desperate and costly effort to fend them off.

One interesting piece is that the technology we saw at the start of the novel is no longer unique to Recluce, and other states have started manufacturing steam ships and ironsides warships as well. Lerris gets very annoying in parts because of how obtuse he is about other people's reactions to his actions, but by and large he's still a very likable character, and has hobbies other than saving the world, which is unusual in this type of adventure story.

The ending is really sad, as with other Recluce novels --- the cost of being able to keep your independence is very high. The book is a bit of a doorstop, taking me a long time to finish but at no point did I feel like I was going to stop reading it. Recommended.

Long Term Review: Anker Battery/USB Adapter for Resmed AirMini

 I used my new Anker Powerbank with converter cable on this past sailing trip. While not a certified CPAP device, it operated with extreme reliability. Even better, the Katja had USB outlets in the cabin that operated even when the boat was sailing and the generator wasn't running! My routine for the days on the sailboat were to wake up, immediately unplug the battery to the CPAP after syncing it to my phone, and plug the battery into the USB outlet to let it trickle charge. By noon, the battery would be full.

I didn't need to use the battery to power any other devices, but in theory, I could have done so. In addition, I wasn't carrying the dedicated charger that could only be used to charge the Pilot-24. The battery performance was also superior --- at no point did I drain it past 50%, so I could have survived 2 nights on the Anker battery if I needed to.

When traveling to places where I have wall power, I pair this with the Anker 715 Nano II 65w charger.  This saves no weight compared to carrying the dedicated AirMini charger, but unlike the dedicated AirMini charger, the Anker charger can be used to charge any other USB-C compatible device, so it serves two purposes!

This is clearly a superior option to what I was using before and I can recommend it without reservations.

Review: Fenix 7 Pro Sapphire Solar

Through a series of unlikely events, I managed to snare a Fenix 7 Pro Sapphire Solar at an excellent price. Given that I had also gotten a Garmin Edge 840 recently, I no longer felt obliged to get the biggest screen possible, so I went for the 47mm version of the watch, which is smaller while not being as small as the S. It fits perfectly and is lighter. Unlike in the past, where the X series usually has additional features not on the other sizes of watch, for the 7 Pro series all watches have the same feature. The difference is in size, weight and battery life. I did not opt for the Epix series because there were reports that in cycling mode the display would turn itself dim.

The number of new metrics available on the Fenix 7 Pro that didn't exist on the 5X is substantial. First, you get a training readiness metric that you didn't use to get. Unlike in the past Fenixes, this seems actually accurate. I had a stressful trip and it told me that my body was strained and that i should back off from serious activities.

The sleep section is vastly enhanced, now including breath detection, SpO2 (which by default only turns on during sleep to detect sleep apnea), and a body battery metric that does a relatively good job of detecting how much left you are (though you probably shouldn't need an app to tell you that!)

There's a new wrist mounted flashlight on the watch, which works really well, and I've used it often enough that it doesn't feel like a gimmick, which surprised me. What's better about it than using your smartphone as a flashlight is that being mounted on your wrist effectively makes the flashlight hands free, which is a much bigger deal than you might imagine.

Even the heart rate monitor is improved, giving much more accurate than what was on the Fenix 5X, which I considered science fictional. For instance, my HR never rose about 100 during strength training on the Fenix 5X, but with the 7 Pro it regularly registers 140 when lifting. That makes way more sense. One interesting thing is that if you choose to use a separate heart rate monitor and take off your Fenix, the Fenix doesn't carry that data over from your Edge, and instead treats that segment of the day as blank. On the other hand, for road riding using the device as a HRM doesn't seem to burn substantial battery life, so I'm OK with that. In fact, on a bike tour that means the watch substitutes as a HRM and you no longer have to bring a separate one.

What does feel gimmicky is the sapphire solar screen. Over the course of a 10-day sail trip, it felt like it added at most 4 hours of battery life, not substantial enough to make a huge difference. On the other hand, if I was going on a multi-day backpacking trip with no access to charging my suspicion is that this might let me eke out one more day of battery life. Of course, my CPAP battery would probably run out long before this happened.

Unlike the Edge series, the Fenix doesn't store elevation data on maps. This lets me load it up with both European and US maps and still have substantial storage left. As a backup for the Edge 840 I think this is a good device to have.

There's now a snorkel mode but I didn't find out about it until after my trip. I'll remember to use it next time! There's also jet lag advisory and altitude acclimation data and advise that will be substantially useful in the alps or on mountain trips. I've done enough of those trips that I don't really need this, but if you're new to big mountains I think this will be very useful!

There's a "good morning" screen that summarizes how ready you are to train, how well you slept (which might give you anxiety if you're the anxious type), and some encouragement to start your day off with. It was surprisingly good to have on my sailing trip!

All in all, I'm surprised at how much the Fenix 7 Pro has improved over the 5X. Then again, that's 4 generations of devices. I probably should have upgraded earlier but waiting for a lower price is never something I will regret.

Review: The Curious Human Knee

 The Curious Human Knee is a book about the knee. I borrowed it from the library expecting to learn about the knee's architecture, why they are so easily damaged, and how to prevent injury and what the process of fixing a damaged knee is. Instead I got a curious mis-mash of knee information and weird fashion segmentations. The author feels like she suffered from a case of ADHD, jumping from one random topic to another.

I've long thought that the human knee was a particularly good example of poor engineering. Han Yu instead explains that the reason the knee is so easily damaged is because it's so flexible and offers so many degrees of freedom of movement:

Dynamic freedom comes at a terrible cost. The knee is flexible because it is fundamentally unstable. It is, essentially, a few pieces of rigid, ill-fitting bones bound up by rope-like soft tissues. Nothing is fused in place, so the knee can move in just about any direction. For the same reason, it can also twist, misalign, overstretch, or simply fall apart. (kindle loc 508)

Ok, so what can we do? She mentions  that there are training programs that can help prevent injury:

In one program, female high-school volleyball players were drilled in various jumping tasks: broad jump, vertical jump, single-legged jump, squat jump, and more.98 The emphasis was placed on maintaining good techniques: keep the spine erect and shoulders back, point the knees forward, jump with the chest over knees, and land softly with bent knees and toe-to-heel rocking. After six weeks of training, the participants were able to reduce valgus collapse stress by about 50 percent, increase hamstring power by up to 44 percent, and reduce landing force by 22 percent.99 In another successful program, female soccer players completed, among other things, leg stretching, jumping tasks, and strengthening exercises.100 Similar emphasis was put on correct landing techniques. Compared with soccer players in the same league who did not enroll in the program, those who were enrolled saw an 88 percent reduction in ACL injury in the first season and 74 percent reduction in the second season. (kindle loc 1826)

Details? How to do it yourself? Nada. That kinda sucks. She does debunk several myths. For instance, icing does nothing, and neither do prophylactic braces. In fact, both might cause more problems:

 Compared with using a stationary bike to cool down, immersing legs in cold water after strength training reduced muscle mass and strength.34 Researchers have speculated that this is because muscle protein synthesis depends on blood supply, and icing, by reducing blood supply, suppresses protein synthesis. In other words, icing can negate the benefits of exercise and reduce long-term muscle development, quite the opposite outcome for people who ice for sports recovery. (kindle loc 2506)

 prophylactic braces were not able to reduce knee injuries; in fact, they seemed to make players more likely to hurt themselves.81 Alarmed, the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Sports Medicine issued a statement in 1990 recommending that these braces “not be considered standard equipment for football players.”82 (kindle loc 2709)

 Then suddenly the book would switch into a discussion of skirt length and fashion. It would then come back and tell you interesting things about Osteo-Arthritis:

Despite their relatively lower body mass index, Asian populations have more knee OA than Western populations.58 In Malaysia, for example, an estimated 25 percent of people over the age of fifty-five suffer from knee OA.59 In Korea, 38 percent of people over the age of sixty-five do. (kindle loc 3488)

It turns out that many Asian cultures do a lot of kneeling, and that's not good for your knee. The book then jumps back into fashion and discusses ripped jeans and other distressed clothing that are part of fashion nowadays. Sure, I'm concerned about the environmental impact of fashion and the irony of rich people wearing clothes that are deliberately made to look worn out (my wife had to tell me to throw out swim shorts because they were starting to develop holes in all the wrong places), but does that really belong in this book?

I really wanted to like this book, but I think in this case the author needed a much better editor than the one she had.

Review: Garmin Edge 840

 The Pro's Closet had open box Edge 840 for under $300 before Black Friday, and at that price it was too good to resist. The big feature that I wanted that's not available on the Fenix 5X is Freeride Climb Pro, which Garmin has said that it will not bring to watches because the watches have to deal with runners and Freeride Climb Pro is just too hard to do for runners. The other feature is that it now charges via USB-C, which saves one more cable type to bring (though unfortunately most of my bike lights are still micro-USB, so I can't avoid having a few adapters when I travel with the bike) 

Ok, coming from using my Fenix 5X as a bike computer, the Edge 840 feels like it's a giant screen. Garmin has also revamped its UI, so you get choices between Road, Gravel, Commute, MTB. In addition, the Edge 840 has both buttons and touch screen, and I found myself using both UIs! The map display is excellent, and Garmin no longer tries to rip you off by charging for European maps if you happen to buy a US unit.

The 32GB storage is not enough to store both US maps and European maps at the same time! I was quite disappointed by that. Storage is cheap, and you would think that Garmin would take $10 out of its profit margins to give me both US and European maps at the same time. The nice thing is that Garmin with its new UI can now display graphs, so you can get a nice climbing graph or power meter graph.

Climb Pro behaves as I expect, giving you its best guess as to what hill I'm going to ride, and despite some friends telling me it wasn't accurate, it seemed to work just fine for my favorite hills. For grins I tried the structured workout mode and it told me after the workout that I did a horrible job of complying with the workout.

I rarely follow routes, but when I tried it as an experiment, whenever I go off route (which I invariably do) the UI now gives me an option to pause navigation (if you know where you're going) or to route back onto the route. Sweet!

Charging is fast, and battery life is good enough that I never have to charge it more than once a week. Syncing to Garmin connect is fast as well, and it brings over all the sensors from my old Fenix 5X no problem, including HRMs, speed sensors, cadence sensors, etc. Stay within the Garmin ecosystem and everything works great.

Startup is also superfast. I can no longer play the game of starting up the computer and taking off at rocket speed to keep the GPS confused for as long as possible. All in all, it's a great device and I'm looking forward to touring with it!