Review: American Vampire Vol 1

 Boen's been on a Stephen King kick of late, reading various Stephen King novels like Christine, I saw that American Vampire Vol 1 was available as a Prime free loan, so I checked it out and read it. The narrative is split into two timestreams: one (written by Scott Snyder) set in the 1920s in Hollywood, as two young actresses who're hoping to make it big get dragged into a party for the Hollywood Big Wigs in hopes of landing a great role. Rather than going Harvey Weinstein on them, the big wig instead sucks their blood (hey, it's a vampire book, what did you expect).

The second timestream is set in the time of the Wild West. This narrative was written by Stephen King, and it's obvious that he's new to comic book writing. There's way too much dialog, and not enough time spent making you care about the characters.

The art is good, but the vampire schtick is kinda worn out. It's nothing that you haven't seen in Blade, for instance. I was hoping for more originality. I guess the vampire trope is so worn out that even Stephen King can't come up with a good new story, and is stuck retelling old stories.

Re-read: Lone Wolf and Cub - The Assassin's Road

 I remember reading and enjoying a few issues of Lone Wolf and Cub as a teenager, so I checked out the first volume, The Assassin's Road from Hoopla. A lot of the art and for instance, the stand-off sword-fight scenes look very familiar, because games like Ghost of Tsushima have adopted the art and the tropes and made them look great.

What I was unprepared for was a reminder that the Japanese do not hide behind a rating system for their comics. There's rape, seduction, lots of blood and gore (in black and white) and obviously, there's the incongruity of a Samurai assassin taking on murderous bounty jobs with a 5-year old in tow.

The whole volume (in which the origin story only appears right at the end of the volume) is full of situations where Itto Ogami (the titular Lone Wolf) through craft, guile, and just sheer amazing swordsmanship, dispatches his targets and then walks off into the sunset, baby cart in tow. There are lots of action lines, and the dynamism of the art leaves no question that this is an action comic.

It's enjoyable in small doses. I think I'll space out my reading of the series.

Review: Apple in China

 I make no bones about my dislike of Apple and everything it stands for. To me, Apple represents the worst of American culture:

• Disposable, throwaway products that cannot be easily repaired (or even just replace the battery)
• Form over function, to the point where Steve Jobs told its users "you're holding the phone wrong", when it was clearly a badly designed antenna system
• User-hostile product design that's designed to make you spend more money on its ecosystem (e.g., taking away the headphone jack, or removing the SIM card slot so you have no choice but to go through Apple to even purchase a cell phone plan)

Apple in China, despite it's subtitle about Apple being the greatest company, is no sycophantic tract talking about how great Apple is. It is a systematic, well-researched history of how Apple "outsourced" its manufacturing to an entire supply chain in China, and in doing so, massively sped up the acquisition of advanced technology in China. The word "outsource" is in quotes as follows:

Apple had essentially cracked the code on how to manufacture the world’s best products without doing any of the manufacturing itself. It wasn’t really “outsourcing” in the normal sense—that would imply it was sending blueprints to companies capable of taking the orders and executing. Instead, Apple was routinely sending its top engineers, designers, procurement specialists, and lawyers from the United States into hundreds of factories across the country, where they’d import machinery, train armies of workers, coordinate the delivery of intermediate goods, and scrutinize suppliers to ensure compliance. Apple’s influence was enormous, but no senior executives lived in China or understood the politics, nor had Apple appointed anyone to oversee the business or manage government affairs. (kindle loc 97)

In fact, as the book discusses, despite American politicians' lamentations about how America has forgotten how to do manufacturing, it's quite clear that all throughout the book, Apple has not forgotten how to do manufacturing, and is in fact, at the cutting edge of advanced manufacturing. What it has done is to deliberately design its products and supply chain to take advantage of the resources available in China in order to scale its advanced manufacturing:

Apple wasn’t, by any stretch, the largest computer maker working in Taiwan, but its penchant for complex designs and intolerance for defects was unique and over-the-top, necessitating a form of intellectual investment shared by none of its rivals. Apple veterans from the time can’t stress enough that nobody else was embedding dozens of engineers into Taiwanese suppliers, then consistently pushing the envelope on what was possible. “Apple is single-handedly responsible for bringing quality into Southeast Asia,” says Robert Brunner, the director of the ID studio from 1990 to 1997. “If you look at the capability they brought up in that region, from a manufacturing standpoint, it’s solely on their presence and their demands on these organizations that caused them to build that competency of being able to make quality things.” For the biggest computer makers at the time, design and R&D were such secondary considerations to logistics and efficiency that Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy once likened Dell to a grocery store: “They’re not in the PC business any more than Safeway is in the food manufacturing business.” (kindle loc 1083)

One of the most interesting examples is the use of end-of-line testing equipment. The book describes these pieces of equipment were originally designed for lab benches, and cost north of $100k each. Apple insisted on buying them in bulk and installing them at the end of factory lines in order to ensure quality. While you might expect that Apple expects its contract manufacturers to foot the bill for these machines, Apple went and bought them and had them flown into the factories and installed. This did a few things. First, these machines were exclusively used for Apple products. Secondly, it was a threat to its supply chain partners. If they ever stepped out of line, Apple would just pull its machines out and place them at alternate factories!

For Dell, ever focused on efficiency, China’s advantages were all about cost and scale—that is to say, they were about margin. But Apple looked at the armies of affordable, available labor and saw a different potential: unconstrained design. Or to put it differently: Western PC companies were shifting to China because of what was available; Apple shifted because of what was possible. Before the return of Jobs, Apple computers were manufactured in a fashion called poka-yoke, a Japanese term meaning “mistake-proofing.” The idea was that products should be designed for easy assembly. And a desire for more automation amplified the trend: From the sketching stage on forward, blueprints for hardware were constrained so machines could put them together without error. But what Apple was realizing was that thousands of laborers cheaply handcrafting Apple hardware on a conveyor-belt production line allowed its designs to be maddeningly intricate, complex, and automation-unfriendly. (kindle 1138)

The book is full of intricate details. For instance, it describes the initial design of the first polycarbonate iMac. What other biographies (usually written by sycophants like Walter Issacson) described as Jobs' genius in pushing his team to the limits and beyond is actually not true! The initial design by Jonathan Ives' group was essentially unmanufacturable! Despite months of Jobs' idiotic pushing, the physics just wouldn't yield. Eventually Jobs sent the design to a firm in Silicon Valley that he trusted, and they responded that the design was not manufacturer. Only then did Jobs believe Apple's manufacturing engineers, and Jonathan Ives went back and in cooperation with the manufacturing engineers came up with a design that was manufacturable at scale. To Apple's credit, the organization learned from these mistakes and from then on, product design would even go so far as to visit Taiwan and work with manufacturing to ensure that their designs could indeed be fabricated.

The shape is a pyramid, with Jony Ive’s Industrial Design team at the top. ID would conceive how a product would look and feel, with an exactitude that drove fear into the rest of the organization. Their creation goes to Product Design, whose role is to figure out the mechanical engineering and make the product functional. Then it moves to manufacturing engineers—a small team back then, and later a distinct unit called Manufacturing Design, or MD—who work with component makers and final assembly partners to actually build the product. Finally, the Operations team comes in. They work with vendors that their colleagues have already selected, and then optimize everything to help the product scale. But crucially, Ops also has a prerogative to find other component makers, other final assembly partners, to build resiliency, cut prices, and to instill competition. (kindle loc 1441)

The relationship with  Foxconn is similarly described in detail. Foxconn bent over backwards to get Apple's business, despite making no profits. This was a deliberate strategy to build up his own company's manufacturing expertise:

“His people used to hate us, because they used to make no money out of us,” says an Apple operations executive. “The Compaq guys”—the Foxconn team building for Compaq—“were making a fortune on bonuses, and no one wanted to come work on the Apple account because there were no bonuses.” But Gou answered to no one. He took a long-term view, knowing that if his team could please Apple, they could please any client. (kindle loc 1410)

 Gou even deployed a clever tactic to rotate his workers on Apple projects, to maximize the learning. “We trained all of them. Then one day we’d be like, ‘Where’d those engineers go?’ ” says Fadell. He’d learn that they’d gone to work on other projects, using their new skills in areas that were more lucrative. Then Apple would be forced to teach a new cohort of people, as if a new semester had started. (kindle loc 2007)

 Page after page, the book's details and research is impeccable and very much worth reading. There's a whole chapter about employee burnout at Apple through constant trips to China. Once in China, the work was non stop and relentless. Apparently, many employees ended up losing their families as a result of this work schedule. To my surprise, Apple's manufacturing engineers must have been extremely poorly paid. The book describes one instance where a wife called up a husband and loudly denounced his upcoming trip to China and threatening a divorce if he made the trip. The manager's solution? Offer the engineer a $10k bonus for taking the trip, buying off the spouse. Even in the mid 2000s, I cannot imagine a single Google engineer's wife considering a $10K bonus (after taxes it would have been $6k) suitable compensation for taking away her husband for months. One engineer was even told by his doctor to quit his job or die on it:

Apple came close to codifying the principle that pushing employees to burnout was acceptable. In a slide deck called Leadership Palette, Apple states: “Fighting for excellence is about resisting the gravitational pull of mediocrity. It involves being dead tired and still pushing yourself, and others, to get it right, every time.” One engineer says the reason he left Apple after more than a decade is that during a routine medical appointment, his doctor noted his high blood pressure and said, “Okay, I need you to do two things for me: lose weight and quit Apple.” The doctor explained that the stress would basically kill him. Some Apple engineers can even rattle off the names of people who died on the production line or upon their return from yet another trip to Asia. The engineers were often in their forties and fifties, and while it’s not possible to conclude that overwork was their cause of death, many believe it was. One longtime veteran recalls that, during the funeral for one of these people, the number of Apple employees who left the Sunday service to join conference calls was unbelievable...Jon Rubinstein, who worked for Steve Jobs on and off for sixteen years, called the long workweeks “shattering,” and it’s what led to his own departure later on. “A lot of people got sick at Apple,” he once said. “The list goes on and on of people who got terminally ill or really ill… and I worried that if I stayed, I’d end up damaging myself, and my health was, frankly, more important.” He added: “Steve used to always tell the groups, ‘This will be the high point of your life,’ and I was thinking, God, I hope not, right? Because that’s really a sad way to think.” (kindle loc 2112 - 2122)

There's even a story of the manager of the Apple store in Beijing voluntarily going to jail in order to defuse a nasty situation at the Apple store. If you remember all those stories  about fights breaking up in China's Apple stores about being given a chance to buy an iPhone? This book explains the background. It turns out all the people in those lines were scalpers who were paid to buy the phones and then those phones got distributed into the Chinese market. 

The book describes Apple's slow awakening into China's politics and how Xi Jinping's ascendence caught them by surprise. But rather than diversifying its supply chain, Apple instead doubled down on it, making itself even more vulnerable to China disruption than before. It took multiple supply chain failures before Apple started taking even small steps to do manufacturing outside China, and even then those steps are half-hearted and slow, mainly out of fear that if Apple moved quickly China would cut them off. I have friends who defend Apple by saying that other manufacturers are similarly vulnerable. This book completely debunks that. It turns out that Samsung makes more phones than Apple but is almost completely immune to a China supply chain disruption:

Samsung, the only company that sells more phones than Apple, is much less vulnerable. Samsung runs its own chip foundries, which are second only to TSMC, in Korea and Texas, and in 2023 the company pledged to invest $230 billion to build five new fabrication plants over the next two decades. Indeed, Samsung is likely to be the biggest winner in the event of an earthquake in Taiwan, be it political or natural. Disruption to supply chains in Taiwan would hinder Samsung’s ability to import certain components, but the impact would be far less than for Apple. (kindle loc 5383)

 Needless to say, the highlights and quotes I've provided in this book are a tiny fraction of the book filled with interesting, insightful stories and never before disclosed details. It definitely disrupts the usual story about manufacturing knowhow being shipped overseas, and it's a far better story than the usual books about China such as Breakneck.  This book makes those books look like the shallow, sophomoric and poorly researched books that they are. If the Financial Times reporting is all like this I should give up my subscription to other magazines and subscribe to FT instead!

I wouldn't be surprised if come November I nominate this book as the book of the year. That's how good it is. Highly recommended.

P.S. One thought I had after finishing this book is that you should be very optimistic about manufacturing in the USA. Apple (and other American companies) still know a lot about manufacturing. If the country ever got its political act together enough to want to do a big manufacturing drive, the fact that China did it so quickly meant that the USA can do so as well. Of course, that depends on Americans politically understanding the situation well enough to vote accordingly. That part of the equation I'm not very opitmistic about.

Review: Wonders of the Universe

 Wonders of the Universe is the companion book to Brian Cox's TV show of the same name. I read the book on Hoopla, so probably didn't get the best way of viewing the book. The pictures are tiny, and uninspiring, and if the TV show was well produced it probably looks way better than the crappy photos that show up in the book.

It is probably my least favorite Brian Cox book, probably because it covers topics already covered in his many other books, but without the deeper pedagogy displayed in those books. Like Cosmos, it covers a lot more history of science than it actually does the science, and so the science that it does present has to be simplified.

Don't get me wrong, the book's diagrams does teach you new stuff that wasn't in the previous books, but you have to look hard for it, and obviously reading the book on Hoopla doesn't give you the crisp photos that would be in the paper book. In addition, I really question the choice of photographs used in the book --- maybe the TV show would inspire awe, but in the book the photos just look drab and uninspiring. Better to leave the photos out if you're going to choose bad photos!

Re-read: The Magician King

 It's a strange feeling to re-read The Magician King after having seen a few seasons of The Magicians TV show. On the one hand, Lev Grossman is such a bad writer that the best episodes of the TV show are so much better written. By contrast to the TV show, the book's plot structure has our protagonists being driven by events, with no plans and no motivation, with events unfolding one after another as though in a dream.

On the other hand, a novel (even one in a trilogy of fantasy novels) doesn't have the constraints a TV show has, so characters can die a permanent death. In this book, half the plot is about Julia's career as a hedge Magician, working her way up the hierarchy of a series of safe houses. In the TV show, this was all done in parallel with the first couple of seasons, and obviously, the TV show wanted to keep Stella Maeve in the show, so Julia never got the final arc the book gave her.

Once again, the protagonists like Quentin and Eliot aren't very likeable, but the ending, with Quentin getting kicked out of Fillory had a finality that the TV show never achieved in the episodes I watched. (I haven't seen all the season so maybe his exit from the TV show is better) But the book did give Quentin moments of competence as befit the title of the novel, which to be honest the TV show didn't seem to ever do.

Obviously, I enjoyed the book enough to re-read it, so I have to give it a recommended tag.

Review: Why does E=MC^2? (And Why Should We Care?)

 I guess I'm on a Brian Cox kick, and this time, it's his 2009 book, Why does E=MC^2? I really enjoy the way he finds different ways of explaining similar things. This time, he explains relativity, but without recourse to any Penrose diagrams. He basically starts with 2 assumptions, one driven by experiment, which is the speed of light is measured to be the same no matter where you are, how fast you're going. The second is that causality applies, in other words no way can you ever see the effect prior to the cause.

From there, he uses the Pythagoras theorem, but applied to 4-dimensional space-time, and derives the basic equation. It's an impressive tour de force, and explained clearly and relatively cleanly, even down to the use of complex numbers. He then goes on to explore what mass is, then introduces the standard model of quantum mechanics, and proceeds to describe various relativistic effects.

This book was written before the conclusive discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN, but was clearly very confident about the outcome of the LHC experiments. I thought it was quite a lot of fun to read. Maybe I should start watching his TV shows as well.

Review: Human Universe

 Human Universe is based on Brian Cox's TV show.  Apparently, that's a show similar to Cosmos. I read it and enjoyed it quite a bit. First of all, unlike his other books that I've read, this is much more of a science history book than a technical book explaining physics. We start rather similarly to Cosmos, with an explanation of our view of the universe and how it went from us being the center of the universe to the solar-centered view of the solar system.

From there, we expand out to our understanding of where we are in the galaxy and where our galaxy is in the universe. As the scope increases, we get into deeper questions of cosmology, for instance what happened before the big bang. To my surprise, I actually learned new stuff here. Cox posits that inflation predated the Big Bang, and that the matter that we get were the residue after inflation had slowed down. He further posits that inflation might not have stopped in all parts of the (multi-)universe, and that parts of the universe might still have inflation happening. The speculation is then that the laws of physics that occur outside our visible universe might be different. We get an exposition of the Anthropic principle (both strong and weak versions of it). Cox does all this without reference to String theory, which I appreciate.

We also get an exposition of the Drake's Equation. (By the way, one of my pet peeves is that the Drake's equation doesn't factor in the probability that the planet has a strong enough magnetic field to keep its atmosphere from being blown away by its star --- the fact that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field is an indication that magnetic fields are not a given) There's speculation as to why there aren't any other aliens out there (Cox posits that the transition to multi-cellular life through the evolution of Eukaryotes took 3.5M years, which meant that it wasn't a given!).

I enjoyed the book and learned not a little. Recommended.

Review: The Quantum Universe

 The Quantum Universe is Brian Cox's introduction to quantum mechanics. Of all the books attempting to teach quantum mechanics that I've tried to read, this is the one that has the best pedagogy. Rather than follow the historical approach (introducing Heisenberg and Schrodinger's approaches first), Cox decides to use the Feynman approach right away. This allows for a geometric and diagrammatic approach to the subject that makes the initial approach relatively easy.

The approach rather than using equations with complex numbers and trigonometric functions like sine and cosine, takes advantage of the fact that you can represent complex numbers with a polar diagram. To make things easier for the layman, Cox describes these as "clocks", with magnitude represented by the size of the clock, and the hour hand (there are no minute hands in these clocks) representing the vector composed out of the real and imaginary parts. He then defines the rules for "adding" and "subtracting" clocks, and then defines how interference and cancellation of waves works. Out of all these mechanics he then gets to show how the famous double split experiment results are described correctly by this system.

From there, of course, the topic only gets harder. We extrapolate this system from photos to quarks, bosons, and Cox waves his hands and says these differ because the rules for the manipulation of clocks are different for each category. We get a walkthrough of how the standard model explains how an atom holds together, how the electrons in a hydrogen atom works, an explanation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and how the Higgs boson gives mass to the other particles.

Don't get me wrong. Quantum mechanics is hard. I found myself tired and falling asleep after spending an hour reading chapters of this book. I suspect the best way to approach this is to not try to read this book at bed time (though it did succeed in making me sleepy), but to do it during the day with pencil and paper handy and actually work through all the equations and diagrams he poses.

The book ends with deriving Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar's result that a neutron star cannot be more than 1.4 times the size of the sun. This is a tour de force, involving everything you've learned so far. I will admit I couldn't follow all of it, but nevertheless I enjoyed the book.

Review: Congratulations, By The Way

 Congratulations, By The Way was George Saunder's commencement speech at Syracuse University. It's mercifully short, and went viral, after which it got turned into a book.

The kindle formatting of the book is awful. It looks like a children's board book with just 4-6 sentences per page, completely disrupting the flow and feel of the speech. I for one, feel like he should have just posted the darn thing on a blog.

I don't object to the content --- of course you should be kind, and of course you should actually take some time to cultivate your kindness. But one thing you have to bear in mind is that fiction writers are essentially professional liars. As Charlie Stross once said: "Give me money and I'll tell you lies." So I suspect that he does regret the time he jumped into a river what monkeys have pooped in in Africa and gotten sick for days afterwards. I certainly would.

The book is also very vague on what kindness is. For instance, many people think it's kinder to lie to someone about how they look, or how smart they are, than to be honest and tell them that they suck. I actually think that a commitment to honesty, at least to the people you care about the most matters more and is kinder than the momentary feel of warmth. After all, if you make a habit out of lying to the people you love you eventually lose credibility and there is no kindness in that. (Then of course, I watch as my two sons tell each other lovingly that they're fat even when they both have BMIs well below the average, and maybe that kind of lying isn't that bad)

It's a quick read, you won't get much out of it, and it should have been a blog post.

Review: Black Holes - The Key to Understanding the Universe

 Black Holes is written by Brian Cox, a professor at the University of Manchester in England, and is fundamentally an introduction to relativity by using the extreme case of a Black Hole to motivate the exploration of relativity.

The tone of the book is conversational, but do not let the first few chapters mislead you --- the authors do not shy away from equations. The book introduced me to Penrose diagrams, which I've never seen in any other relativity-explainer book before, and uses those diagrams to explain time dialation, the split between what you can get information from and who you can send information to, and how space-time and black holes work.

The authors even get into the various nuances of differing types of black holes --- spinning ones versus stationary ones, ones that are pure singularity versus the types that were created from stars collapsing. There's an entire chapter on Hawking radiation and how that leads to black hole evaporation, as well as how the conservation of information is or is not preserved by black hole evaporation and Hawking radiation.

There's even an exploration of how wormholes and black holes are related, and how that ties into Penrose diagrams which are used to also explain how the wormhole actually separates two parts of the universe, or two universes.

I think a diligent student (I do not claim to be one!) who carefully works through the diagrams and equations in this book can actually come away with a great understanding of Penrose diagrams and space-time warping and dialation. I was impressed enough by the authors' pedagogic approach to want to read more books by Brian Cox.

Review: The Highest Exam - How the Gaokao Shapes China

 Xiaoqin was reading The Highest Exam, and it migrated onto my kindle. Having recently read Breakneck, I decided to read the book, which was written by two academics rather than a commercial analyst.

The book is a deep dive on China's educational meritocracy, which is described by the authors as a hierarchical tournament. When they were growing up, you needed to pass an exam to get admitted to middle school, and then another exam to get into a high school (the exam also decides which high school you're admitted to based on how well you scored), and then finally, the Gaokao, the exam that decides whether you get into college, and if so, which college.

At the top of the pyramid are China’s most exclusive elite colleges, which receive priority over all other universities in government funding and resources. Only students whose exam scores are at the very top of the score distribution in each province can gain admission to these schools. Below the elite colleges are the remaining four-year universities. (kindle loc 177)

China's elite school take in less than 5% of the student population. Note that you do not apply to each individual school, you're assigned to a college based on your score at the Gaokao, with the 3 top universities (Peking, Tsinghua, and Fudan) being the most prestigious. The authors note that China's return on education for the general population going to college is 40% (i.e., someone who goes to college and graduates earns 40% more than someone who didn't get in), but the elite colleges net you an additional 40%. They pretend to be surprised that Chinese citizens are so devoted to doing well in exams when that additional gain doesn't seem to justify the 50% or more of income the poorer rural population spends on their children's education. They then note that it's not just monetary rewards, it's also prestige, access to government jobs (i.e., a chance to rise high in the political hierarchy), and social validation. The results of the Gaokao does follow you through your life. (One of the authors got a PhD in economics, and I'm shocked that he didn't just ascribe a value to the social prestige and opportunity and realize that it probably stacks another 40% on top of the monetary values he ascribes)

There are a few minor surprises. For instance:

China’s high school students perform better than those of any other country on measures like critical thinking, reading, and math. But during their four years in college, evidence indicates that the skills of the average student in China stagnate, or perhaps even decline. (kindle loc 209)

This shouldn't surprise anyone. The current tenured professors are probably from pre-Deng China, and so might not be as up to date as the newer batch of professors who are returning from overseas. I wouldn't be surprised if this metric reverses in the next few decades as older professors retire and are replaced by younger, internationally competitive scholars.

The authors also note that China's version of DEI is to give minorities an automatic, 10 point bonus to their exam scores. This is huge, because at the cut off (e.g., between elite universities and their fellows, or between going to college and not), the difference between getting in or not getting in might be a single point. Despite that, you will not hear Chinese people complaining, because that bonus is transparent and accepted, though members of minority tribes that are too big to qualify of the bonus are at pains to point it out to their classmates, so as to avoid the stigma of being a DEI entry.

The authors posit that this gaokao system is a form of population control. Basically, if the common people are competing against each other (and given that it's a hierarchical tournament, you're competing with people you know --- your neighbors and community, and you know people before you who've won the tournament and went on to have a great life), they're not going to band together to protest for personal liberties or complain about corruption elsewhere in the system.

I don't buy this argument at all. The reason is because the rest of the world use very similar systems to determine how to allocate scarce resources to students! In India, admissions to the IIT is through a competitive exam, and just like in China, your admissions is based entirely on that score. No essays, recommendations or extra-curricular actives matter. OK, maybe India is just as corrupt as China in its other institutions. Guess what, the UK also use the GCE "O" levels (to gate entry into high school), and "A" levels (to gate entry to college) as well. Their top Universities even have their own exams as the grades at the "A" levels are way too granular to distinguish the very cream of the crop that they have room to admit. Singapore and Taiwan use very similar system. In Singapore, even going from first grade to second grade is gated by an exam that then sorts the students into varying classes of similar ability. When you have 40 kids per class and limited resources, this is the only way to go, since it makes the teachers' jobs way easier when everyone in class has similar ability and you're not neglecting the high performers to deal with the disruptive kid coming from a broken family. And yes, it leads to a "rich get richer" society, but on the other hand, it's not a bad thing to have all the disruptive kids disrupt each other from learning instead of disrupting the learning of your best talent.

It is only the Americans that have created the most corrupt of ways to do college admissions, and to do so in such a way as to anger everyone in society by making it non-transparent, beholden to wealthy people who can buy their way in, and worse, degrading the value of their own degrees because once you've admitted a legacy student who's paying $100k/year, you cannot flunk him out. And once you cannot flunk that high paying student you can no longer flunk anyone out, even the least prepared students. The end result is that 1 in 8 freshmen at UCSD cannot do 8th grade level math. This helps no one but managers to make everyone (including myself) really angry. Once in a while you get some crazy article written in The Atlantic or The New York Times by some high level academic claiming that meritocracy doesn't work, and that it leads to inequity, but the dirty little secret is that Americans have never tried meritocracy, don't know how other countries do it (and do it correctly), and those statements written by academics don't count because college professors do not get involved in undergraduate admissions! Undergraduate admissions are done by a department that's not composed of academics, don't care about academics, and by and large do not come from STEM fields. An entertaining personal essay that's largely fiction will not get fact checked by people in the admissions departments!

In this book, the authors point out way after way the Gaokao system is unfair: poor rural schools are under funded and don't have great teachers, poor students cannot afford to take the exam multiple times, urban students (particularly in Beijing and Shanghai) get more spots allocated to them at top schools. But even at the end they admit that no matter how unfair the Gaokao system is, it's a lot less unfair than the American system --- every year there are always rural students who do win their tournaments and make it into a top school, and they beat the cut-off scores not by a little, but by a lot!

In any case, I found the book worth reading, but the authors just aren't familiar enough with how other non US non China countries do admissions for their opinions to be worth 2 US cents or 2 renminbi.

Review: Breakneck

 Breakneck is Dan Wang's book contrasting Chinese and American societies. It's actually mostly about Chinese society, because though the author is very familiar with American society, he presumes you know nothing about Chinese society.

The author worked as an analyst in China, living in Beijing or Shanghai, but has also traveled to Guizhou and the mountainous areas in the past. In fact, he did a bicycle tour in Guizhou on roads that were just recently built before cars were allowed on them, which sounds pretty cool. He also met his wife there.

Dan Wang uses the analogy that China is run by engineers and America by lawyers. He makes blanket statements like: "What do engineers like to do? Engineers like to build, so China builds. Roads, high speed rail, housing, etc." He makes other much less flattering statements about engineers, for instance, about how engineers have no sense of humor and cannot stand to be made fun of in social media. Ultimately, however, what Mr. Wang meant is that China is run by technocrats. (Engineers I know in real life are bright, full of humor, and not all of them are fascinated by railroads. In particular, engineers and scientists I know in real life who actually are good engineers and scientists are universally committed to truth --- some of them so much so that they cannot tell a lie even when it benefits them --- whatever else you can say about Chinese politicians you cannot claim that they universally are committed to truth)

The statement that America is run by lawyers is probably familiar to those of you who've read Abundance. The theme here is that by forcing government permitting to go through massive amounts of red tape, lawyers have successfully eliminate the American government's ability to build great infrastructure, and of course the big example is California's high speed rail, which still hasn't build much in 10 years, while China in the same time built enough high speed rail to exceed the track length of multiple European countries. Near the end of the book, Dan Wang notes that he did read The Power Broker, about Robert Moses' dominance of infrastructure building in New York, whose abuses led to the curtailment of government power as previously described. He makes broad statements essentially saying that he visited one of the neighborhoods that were split in half by Robert Moses but there's no a thriving community so people shouldn't villfy him anymore since he built stuff. That segment made me wonder if Dan Wang read the same book I did. One of the big points of the book was that Robert Moses had so much power that he was chauffeured everywhere by private car, and as a result never had to suffer the traffic jams New Yorkers put up with, and so declined to extend the subway/railroad lines. Giving someone like Robert Moses the same power wouldn't result in high speed rail being built either!

I don't want to say I learned nothing from this book. For instance, I didn't know how bad the Shanghai lockdown was, and obviously while I've heard stories about the rigidity and horrors inflicted on girls and women during the one child policy, Mr. Wang provides those details in ways that you can't look away from. (And sad to say, it sounds like the Chinese government is entirely capable of turning women into baby incubators if they ever got it into their head that they could do so)

On the other hand, I will note that the difference that Mr. Wang notes was summarized in much more eloquent form by Iain M. Banks in his essay, A Few Notes on the Culture:

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.

I'm not saying you shouldn't read this book. But I think it says a lot that a few paragraphs by a dead Scottish novelist (who might never have been to China) seems way more insightful to me than an entire book by Dan Wang.

 

Re-read: The Magicians

 The Magicians TV show is now available to stream on Amazon Prime. Boen blew through a couple of seasons and I started re-reading the book to remind myself of how different the book was.

The TV show is actually very different from the book, and in many ways the TV show is better. The stories from the first couple of books are twisted together, and the evil Martin Chatwin character shows up far earlier. Quentin also never goes through the sequence where he lives through the real world post graduation and decides despite all the magical power available to him to live it up through drugs and alcohol. In many ways, the TV show has the best of the books --- the casting of Eliot and Janet/Margo characters are near neigh perfect, and the TV show has many episodes (like the one with Queen's "Under Pressure") that are excellent with no counterpart in the book.

The novel itself is badly written. Lev Grossman doesn't quite develop his characters, and the plot is what makes the book work. There are plenty of reveals after the fact that fit together nicely that the TV show can't quite do justice to, but the writing is uneven.

Having said that, without the books there would be no TV show, and the book itself while not well written has a great plot and sets up a situation that's enjoyable to experience, as evidenced by the TV show going on way past the books' finish without ending up boring to watch.

Review: Looking for Alaska

 Looking for Alaska was John Green's first novel. After reading The Fault in Our Stars I was so impressed I went and looked for more novels by him. As his first novel this book isn't even close to being as good as The Fault in Our Stars.

First, the narrator, Miles Halter is perhaps a bit of a doofus. He's not terribly smart, and goes to boarding school in search of "the great perhaps." He does get a change, with a new roommate ("The Colonel") who's a scholarship student from a poor family, and who pulls him into his orbit with Alaska, who's described as a gorgeous co-ed with a boyfriend.

Perhaps I come from too Asian a background to fully appreciate this story. "The Colonel" strikes me as very false. Someone from a trailer park, for whom the only way out is a university scholarship, but then goes ahead and smokes, drinks, and engages in pranks that could get him expelled from a wealthy private school? No Asian I know in that situation would do any less than Jensen Huang.

Similarly, the protagonist moves to a new school and promptly starts smoking and drinking, despite not enjoying either. In fact, every high schooler depicted in this novel smokes and drinks, frequently to excess. My kids would probably think these guys are idiots, and they wouldn't be wrong.

Eventually, the inevitable happens and someone in the book dies from driving while drunk. There's some redemption as the individual characters blame themselves for not stopping their peer from driving (in fact, they all helped the drunkard by distracting the authorities while they speed off from campus). Then they go right back to drinking and smoking. 

The deluxe edition of this book comes with works-in-progress chapters of the novel. Earlier versions of the novel has Miles sounding like Holden Caulfield. I guess that's where this novel starts from. I don't know why this book won such acclaim as a young adult (YA) novel. I'm glad John Green evolved and grew over time and became capable of writing The Fault in Our Stars. He really did get much better over time.

Review: The Fault in Our Stars

 Last year, I read Everything is Tuberculosis and came away feeling dumber for having read the book. Of course, I'd forgotten that the year before that, I'd bought The Fault in Our Stars during a kindle sale, and had actually read a couple of chapters of it and really enjoyed the voice of the author, and so came back and finished it.

Oh wow. The Fault in Our Stars is sensitive, well-written, well plotted, and emotionally touching in every way Everything is Tuberculosis is not. The story revolves around a cancer victim, Hazel Grace, whose diagnosis was a death sentence partially stayed through a fictional miracle drug. At a support group, she meets Augustus Waters, and the two fall in love.

I don't want to say too much about the novel --- the dialogue is smart, funny, and very characteristic of young adult novels, with that wry sarcasm you hear a lot. That makes everything feel real. The characters rib each other and angst about first world problems --- but because they have cancer or have had cancer you're more than happy to forgive them their foibles. Even the one asshat character has had a member of his family die from cancer.

Finally, after reading this book, the rave reviews for Everything is Tuberculosis makes sense. Cancer for these fictional characters is incurable. People in the book die from cancer. But John Green keeps making the remark in Everything is Tuberculosis that it is curable, we just need to spend money, and it's the inequity in the world humans have set up for themselves that makes Tuberculosis victims die from it. Clearly the heaps of praise for his non fiction comes from people who read and remember The Fault in Our Stars.

I still think Green's non-fiction made me dumber for having read it, but I'm now willing to forgive him that book since this book was so good.

Friction shifting finds its limits

 At the end of September last year, the m5100 rear derailleur on my Carl Strong frame started making funny noises, and shifting performance deteriorated. I finally narrowed it down to the pulley wheels, and after taking the upper one apart saw immediately that the bushing had failed.

A pair of replacement pulley wheels were only $10, but would take a few days. I saw that there was an ebay offer where I could get a GRX 822 rear derailleur for $80, and decided I'd order that as well and install the first one that arrived.

The GRX rear derailleur would handle a 10-51 rear cassette but was designed for 12 speed. Of course, years of shifting with friction shifters have made me blase about using unmatched rear derailleurs. I figured since the job of the derailleur was just to move the chain from one sprocket to another, as long as it could handle the chain and the cassette's spread I should be good to go. It didn't hurt that the derailleur was a good 40g lighter than the m5100 derailleur that it replaced.

At first, I was actually quite pleased with the rear derailleur. It was a lighter action --- whether it was because the higher end derailleur had smoother bearings or pivots and just a lighter action spring, the shifts definitely felt smoother or faster.

The problem was that the shifts were not reliable. For instance, the 45t sprocket was easily one of my favorite sprocket on the m5100. However, it was no longer quiet, making a strange sort of noise whenever it was on that cassette. In fact, the rear derailleur was finicky about staying on that sprocket. Any sort of nudge on the shifter would knock it off that sprocket. Even stranger, once in a while the chain would slip off a sprocket and then rather than recovering to that sprocket the derailleur would shift all the way down the cassette.

I lived with this for awhile, thinking that it was just a matter of retraining my friction shifting muscle memory so that the shifts would be good. But 3 months later it still wasn't good and worse, the chain started falling off the chainring even when the clutch was on. I went so far as to check the chains for both pin wear and lateral wear, and nope. That wasn't my problem.

I finally pulled off the derailleur and put the m5100 back in with the new pulley wheels, and immediately the problems all went away. So somehow, Shimano managed to make their 12s rear derailleur incompatible with the 11s rear cassette even when you're using friction shifters. That's a level of incompatibility I'd never seen before. One possibility is that you really need 12s chains, but since those are expensive I guess I won't make that experiment. In the mean time I guess I have a relatively new GRX 822 rear derailleur for sale.

Review: The Age of Diagnosis

 The Age of Diagnosis is written by a neurologist/psychologist.  It starts with a discussion of Huntington's disease, which is a genetic disease with no known cure, and goes through case study after case study as to why even though there's a non invasive definitive test, people don't get diagnosed for it. Apparently, people show up at her office thinking that taking the test is the responsible thing but looking for permission to not test.

Then she launches into discussions of much more controversial topics, especially topics like autism, which has had increasingly broad ranging diagnostic criteria, to the point where almost anyone could self-diagnose as being on the spectrum. The author is british, and when she spells out the criteria for getting a diagnosis (one thing I learned in this book is that self diagnostic tests are not accurate, and as many as 50% of people who self-diganose are mistakenly thinking that they're on the spectrum when they're actually not!), I'm astonished that the rates of autism have been going up so much. And then she reveals that a lot of the increase in diagnostics come from a small number of physician groups who have an incentive to diagnose more people as being autistic! Even worse than that, the highest functioning autistic folks presume to speak for everyone on the autism spectrum, and of course, the ones most afflicted with autism have a hard time even getting dressed, let alone speak up for their positions, which leads to huge amounts of conflict both within and without the medical and patient communities. (She doesn't mention the elephant in the room, which is that by writing the criteria for autism so broadly, the medical community has inadvertently armed the anti-vaccine folks, who're using the increased number of diagnosis to turn public opinion against vaccines!)

There's a bunch of other diseases discussed in the book, including breast and ovarian cancers (certain genetic mutations vastly increase your chance of getting both, and one way to protect yourself against those cancers is to have those organs removed, but then you have to trade that off against when to have the procedure because you want to maintain maximum optionality for having offspring), down syndrome (testing there has sufficient false positives to make the decision a hard one), long covid, lyme disease, and probably one or more items that I've forgotten about because I read this book in paper format and not on the kindle.

The book ends with a discussion of pyschiatric syndromes and psycho somatic disorders (which the author takes pains to note that a psychosomatic disability is just as real and painful to live with as one with physical manifestations). One of her concerns is that the diagnosis of having one of those boxes you in, and if you believe in that diagnosis enough, it becomes an excuse to not work on getting better in those areas. You start to believe in that instead of your own ability to induce positive changes in yourself!

The book left me quite a lot to think about even though it's short and easily finished in a handful of hours. Definitely worth your time.

Review: King Sorrow

 Stephen King (and his son Joe Hill, who wrote King Sorrow) books all have the same plot structure: there's a problem which the protagonist solves through some supernatural means. It works and empowers the protagonist, who takes it further, and then the negative side effects show up and gets worse and worse until he/she loses control of the situation, upon which the protagonist has to deal with the situation in which the solution becomes much worse than the original problem.

It's a simple plot structure, but within that structure you can tell a large number of stories and the nature of the plot structure if handled well draws you in and keeps you reading, provided that the characters themselves are compelling.

King Sorrow works on that structure, with the protagonists being 6 friends, one of which got into trouble because he did a good deed one day while visiting his mom in prison. To solve this problem, the 6 friends summon a dragon to deal with the evil-doers. The deal with the titular dragon in the novel is that the friends take turns choosing some deserving evil-doer a painful death via dragon.

Where the book rings false is that I have no problem in real life dealing with the kind of power Joe Hill portrays. In this case the side effect is innocent people dying but the reality is that when you look at the scale of damage certain folks like Vladimir Putin cause the kind of collateral damage described in the book wouldn't bother me whatsoever. Yet, Joe Hill makes this a central dilemma of the book, and the only person in the group of 6 for whom that doesn't bother is of course the villain.

The actual fantasy of the book is well done. I enjoyed the urban fantasy aspects, the references to the Arthurian mythos, the tie-in to the internet and trolling. I also admire how Joe Hill started the narrative of the book in the 1970s, and then advancing the narrative by decades to 2022 over time, allowing the protagonists to age and dealing with contemporary events and technological advancements. This integrates the novel with your know.

While this is unlikely to be close to the best novel you've read this year, it was good enough for me to keep reading it (though to be honest I had to take several breaks) and finish it within the library's 3 week return period.

Review: Notes on Being a Man

 Notes on Being a Man is Scott Galloway's open letter to his two teenage sons. It falls into the same genre of self-help books as Succeeding, and since they're both written by rich white guys who won the birth lottery, have the same attitude of excessive confidence and insufficient exposure to different lifestyles and alternative approaches to life.

Nevertheless, both are highly opinionated, and not afraid to call on BS, which means that they're worth reading, and entertaining while reading. In particular, Scott Galloway is one of the few faculty members willing to berate and publicly call out Universities as completely failing to serve their mission by turning themselves into exclusive clubs and aiming for a high rejection rate rather than attempting to educate as many deserving kids as possible.

As smart, talented, and hardworking as their parents were at their age, young people can’t get into the same-quality colleges, higher education having figured out a way to extract more money by artificially constraining supply, thereby forcing these kids to attend lesser places that are—wait for it—exponentially more expensive. (kindle loc 1600)

The top twenty universities could expand their supply—seats for incoming freshmen—50 percent within the decade. But they won’t, as the prestige that stems from scarcity is the ointment for irrelevance that most academics thirst for. (kindle loc 3189)

Rich people who got rich and get to pontificate a lot get to tell their life story. Galloway tells his with an unusual amount of humility --- he got into UCLA on appeal because his mom was a single mother despite having awful grades. He got hired as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley because he was a rower and the interviewer hired anyone who was a rower. As a selfish person he divorced his first wife for no good reason other than that he wanted to move to New York, having become a wealthy successful guy. Basically, his big skill was being able to give great talks, which shows that you can be successful as long as you can talk your way into other people giving you money.

Nevetheless, the book is full of great aphorisms that are told well, and as someone who's a parent, would do well to heed:

The kid you have this summer is leaving… forever. The skinny boy with the lion’s mane who tiptoed into our room and, on first evidence of me stirring, would say, “Dad, let’s make a plan for the day,” is gone. It’s incredibly sad. A relative of his will be back next summer, but different. The compensation is that there will be new attributes you find hilarious and endearing. But still, sad. I put, mentally, a big sign above my boys’ heads: LIMITED EDITION, YOUR ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD SON, ONE SUMMER ONLY. (kindle loc 3200)

 Central to the prosperity and survival of our species is mothers and fathers who have an irrational passion for their kids’ well-being. To fill this role for people who aren’t your offspring is generosity toward the planet and species. I’ve never understood the idolatry of Steve Jobs. The world needs more engaged fathers, not a better fucking phone. (kindle loc 3764)

Of course, I'm biased. Whenever I read an author, I largely judge them by whether I agree with them. 

the United States is the best place to make money; Europe is the best place to spend it. (kindle loc 1582)

(The preceding sentences prior to my quote, however, I completely disagree with).

One of the criticisms I read of this book is that many of the issues Galloway talks about apply also to young women, or even non-white men. I agree. On the other hand, I think that criticism ignores the purpose of the book, which is for a well-intentioned father to leave notes for his son so that if they ever decide his stuff is worth reading (which seems unlikely if his sons are anything like mine), they will have something to refer to. (And they will have no excuse that their Dad didn't say anything or provide decent advice)

If there's any criticism I have about this book, it seems to me that Galloway has pretty low standards for being a father. He admits that he spent most of his kids' childhood traveling for work and focusing work rather than being there for them. He seems to think that the extent of a father's job is to show up for the kids' soccer games and providing lots of money (he flies his kids business class). I guess for a lot of people just becoming super wealthy is the big attribute that most people would want in a father.

The book  is worth reading because it's entertaining. I'm not sure I'd agree with Galloway, but hey, one person can only live one life, as as Pengtoh says, the best way to get to live multiple lives is to read a lot.

Point Reyes Coast Campground

Point Reyes has two fantastic campgrounds, one of which is Wildcat, the other is Coast Campground. (the other campgrounds are either only accessible by boat or inland) We've been to Wildcat on the way to Alameres Falls but never been to Coast Campground. I saw that someone cancelled their reservation for December 30th, and the weather forecast for the 30th was good, so I shifted my existing reservation from New Year's Day to that day.

Coast Campground is uniquely accessible by bike. It's only 3 miles from the Limantour Lodge trailhead along a mostly flat trail, so we brought our bikes: I put my gravel wheels from the Roadini onto Bowen's. Boen's Salsa Journeyman was already set up with 38mm Pacenti Pari-Moto tires, and I brought my ancient Airborne Hardtail as it already had a trailer attachment installed. Xiaoqin, of course, brought her newly acquired Ritchey Montebello. I had purchased Rhinowalk Fork bags for Xiaoqin and Boen's bike, but only 3 out of 4 bags arrived, and Boen didn't like the unbalanced feel of having only one side. We also packed our saddlebags. The Yakima bike trailer was loaded with the car camping oriented Wawona tent and a backpack with all the sleeping bags.

Driving from home, we bought lunch in San Francisco and ate lunch at a picnic table along the way. Arriving at the Limantour Lodge, we saw that it had vacancy, but since we already paid for the campground just got out the bikes and started riding. The bike ride wasn't completely flat, and with a load I actually needed to shift to the lowest gear for the final approach to the campground. You actually saw the beach pretty quick, but the trail took you to the campground where there was a bike rack. We had Site #3, and to my surprise when we pitched the tent we had an ocean view. I was disappointed when I saw we had no fire ring so our firewood was useless.

After pitching the tent, we walked down to the beach and walked around before heading up the Coast trail. It was already 2:45pm, so we didn't have time for an extended walk but we'd never been on this part of the Coast trail before so we just decided to treat it as an out and back. Along the way, we could see various bluffs, beaches, and gaps on the cliff side through which we could see the ocean. We even spotted Elk towards the 3:30pm turn around point. It was very windy. We had talked to some campers who were leaving as we were entering the area and they said that it had been very calm the night before so this was just a sign of the impending storm.

Returning to camp, we made coffee and apple cider, then started making dinner. I noticed that there was a spot near the beach which was protected from the wind, so while waiting the requisite 10 minutes for the mountain house dinners to cook we walked there and admired the gorgeous sunset and ensuing light show. I'd forgotten to bring headlights, but between the two phones and my Garmin we had light.

The night was awful. The wind kept flapping and shaking the tent making it hard to sleep. Even the kids complained. By the time it was 6:00am Xiaoqin was up and in a hurry to go. "I'm not waiting for the rain!" We packed everything up and started cycling back to the car. To be honest, it wasn't very cold and I regretted putting on long underwear and wearing my jacket as I warmed up pretty quick.

We reached the trailhead and there was Yoyo Zhou and his daughter and son, whom I'd never met. We said hi and caught up while Yoyo helped us put the bikes back on the roof. Yoyo's wife showed up --- she had spotted us while we were riding and she was running and we'd never met either! We made brief introductions but since we hadn't had breakfast we were in a bit of a hurry to head home. I would only realize later that Yoyo's birthday was New Year's Eve!

It rained quite a bit on our way home, but when I got home I realized that the bikes weren't even really wet, indicating that all the spots on the windshield were because we were driving at 65mph. Nevertheless, it started raining in earnest so we were glad we got out with a dry tent.