Piaw's Blog

Review: Gut - The Inside Story of Our Body's MOst Underrated Organ

2020-02-03T07:00:00.000-08:00

Gut is a strange book. The author, Giulia Enders has a fun sense of humor (I guess that's what it takes to be a gastroenterologist):

Japanese researchers fed volunteers luminous substances and X-rayed them while they were doing their business in various positions. They found out two interesting things. First, squatting does indeed lead to a nice, straight intestinal tract, allowing for a direct, easy exit. Second, some people are nice enough to let researchers feed them luminous substances and X-ray them while they have a bowel movement, all in the name of science. Both findings are pretty impressive, I think. (Pg. 19)

The book thereby proceeds in fits and starts, lurching from subject to subject in an unpaced fashion. (How much of it is because Enders is German and this book was translated from German I don't know)

But there are some good titbits, lie:

Of particular interest to those fighting fat is that olive oil also has the potential to help get rid of that spare tire. It blocks an enzyme in fatty tissue—known as fatty acid synthase—that likes to create fat out of spare carbohydrates. And we are not the only ones who benefit from the properties of olive oil—the good bacteria in our gut also appreciate a little pampering. (pg. 53)

Nevertheless, the book is full of practical tips, though because of the translation, some of it seems a little confusing:

One example of bacteria dilution in the home is washing fruit and vegetables. Washing dilutes most soil-dwelling bacteria to such a low concentration that they become harmless to humans. Koreans add a little vinegar to the water to make it slightly acidic and just that bit more uncomfortable for any bacteria. Airing a room is also a dilution technique. If you dilute the bacteria on your plates, cutlery, and cutting board nicely with water, then wipe them over with a kitchen sponge before putting them away, you may as well have licked them clean with your tongue. (Pg. 227)

Nevertheless, I enjoyed some of the interesting stories, and many of the stories were new to me, such as this one:

A group of South Americans had to learn that through bitter experience. They had the clever idea of taking pregnant women to the South Pole to have their babies. The plan was that the babies born there could stake a claim to any oil future reserves as natives of the region. The babies did not survive. They died soon after birth or on the way back to South America. The South Pole is so cold and germ-free that the infants simply did not get the bacteria they needed to survive. The normal temperatures and bacteria the babies encountered after leaving the Antarctic were enough to kill them. (pg. 240)

Recommended.

Review: The Body - A Guide for Occupants

2020-01-28T07:00:00.000-08:00

I've bounced of a number of other Bill Bryson books before, so I approached The Body with low expectations. To my surprise I found myself reading the book in earnest, highlighting passage after passage. Here he is about lifespan:

Many factors determine life span, of course, but it is a fact that men who have been castrated live about as long as women do. In what way exactly testosterone might shorten male lives is not known. Testosterone levels in men fall by about 1 percent a year beginning in their forties, prompting many to take supplements in the hope of boosting their sex drive and energy levels. The evidence that it improves sexual performance or general virility is thin at best; there is much greater evidence that it can lead to an increased risk of heart attack or stroke. (Kindle Loc 2490)

I remember reading in one of John Medina's books about how hunter-gathers might walk as much as 10 miles a day. Here's Bill Bryson debunking that:

According to The Economist, some American companies have begun offering rewards to employees who log a million steps a year on an activity tracker such as a Fitbit. That seems a pretty ambitious number but actually works out to just 2,740 steps a day, or a little over a mile. Even that, however, seems to be beyond many. “Some workers have reportedly strapped their Fitbits to their dogs to boost their activity scores,” The Economist noted. Modern hunter-gatherers, by contrast, average about nineteen miles of walking and trotting to secure a day’s food, and it is reasonable to assume that our ancient forebears would have done about the same. (Kindle Loc 2968)

Ok, that's all stuff you already know. But here he is on the puzzle of allergies, and the increasing rate of asthma among children:

An estimated 300 million people in the world have asthma today, about 5 percent of adults and about 15 percent of children in those countries where it is measured carefully, though the proportions vary markedly from region to region and country to country, even from city to city. In China, the city of Guangzhou is highly polluted, while nearby Hong Kong, just an hour away by train, is comparatively clean as it has little industry and lots of fresh air because it is by the sea. Yet in clean Hong Kong asthma rates are 15 percent, while in heavily polluted Guangzhou they are just 3 percent, exactly the opposite of what one would expect. No one can account for any of this... (Kindle Loc 3551)

In children, it is closely associated with both being obese and being underweight; obese children get it more often, but underweight children get it worse. The highest rate in the world is in the U.K., where 30 percent of children have shown asthma symptoms. The lowest rates are in China, Greece, Georgia, Romania, and Russia, with just 3 percent. All the English-speaking nations of the world have high rates, as do those of Latin America. There is no cure, though in 75 percent of young people asthma resolves itself by the time they reach early adulthood. No one knows how or why that happens either, or why it doesn’t happen for the unfortunate minority. Indeed, where asthma is concerned, no one knows much of anything. (Kindle Loc 3567)

As we all know, it's Speaking English that kills you. There's a significant amount of medical history in the book, with lots of tidbits like this one:

in 1970 Congress canceled the only comprehensive federal nutrition survey ever attempted after the preliminary results proved embarrassing. “A significant proportion of the population surveyed is malnourished or at a high risk of developing nutritional problems,” the survey reported, just before it was axed. (Kindle Loc 3986)

Bryson doesn't shy away from politically inconvenient facts, such as the US being the worst country in the world to get healthcare in the developed world:

Even now, however, there is huge variability in maternal mortality rates among countries of the developed world. In Italy, the number of women who die in childbirth is 3.9 per 100,000. Sweden is 4.6, Australia 5.1, Ireland 5.7, Canada 6.6. Britain comes only twenty-third on the list with 8.2 deaths per 100,000 live births, putting it below Hungary, Poland, and Albania. But also doing surprisingly poorly are Denmark (9.4 per 100,000) and France (10.0). Among developed nations, the United States is in a league of its own, with a maternal death rate of 16.7 per 100,000, putting it thirty-ninth among nations. (Kindle Loc 4830)

But even within the US, it's not evenly distributed. Much of the medical problems the US has can be addressed. For instance:

California addressed preeclampsia and the other leading causes of maternal death in childbirth through a program called the Maternal Quality Care Collaborative, and in just six years reduced the rate of childbirth deaths from 17 per 100,000 to just 7.3 between 2006 and 2013. During the same period, alas, the national rate rose from 13.3 deaths to 22 deaths per 100,000. (Kindle Loc 4859)

Of course, this stuff doesn't make the news, and the libertarians are happy to tell you that "government can't solve any problems," even when other countries with government run healthcare manage to do far better than the USA's private system.

The second thing that can be said with regard to life expectancy is that it is not a good idea to be an American. Compared with your peers in the rest of the industrialized world, even being well-off doesn’t help you here. A randomly selected American aged forty-five to fifty-four is more than twice as likely to die, from any cause, as someone from the same age-group in Sweden. Just consider that. If you are a middle-aged American, your risk of dying before your time is more than double that of a person picked at random off the streets of Uppsala or Stockholm or Linköping. It is much the same when other nationalities are brought in for comparison. For every 400 middle-aged Americans who die each year, just 220 die in Australia, 230 in Britain, 290 in Germany, and 300 in France. These health deficits begin at birth and go right on through life. Children in the United States are 70 percent more likely to die in childhood than children in the rest of the wealthy world. Among rich countries, America is at or near the bottom for virtually every measure of medical well-being—for chronic disease, depression, drug abuse, homicide, teenage pregnancies, HIV prevalence. Even sufferers of cystic fibrosis live ten years longer on average in Canada than in the United States. What is perhaps most surprising is that all these poorer outcomes apply not just to underprivileged citizens but to prosperous white college-educated Americans when compared with their socioeconomic equivalents abroad. (kindle Loc 5798)

You would think that being wealthy in the US would protect you from a lot of health problems, but it turns out that many of the problems are systemic:

“Even wealthy Americans are not isolated from a lifestyle filled with oversized food portions, physical inactivity, and stress.” The average Dutch or Swedish citizen consumes about 20 percent fewer calories than the average American, for instance. That doesn’t sound massively excessive, but it adds up to 250,000 calories over the course of a year. You would get a similar boost if you sat down about twice a week and ate an entire cheesecake. (Kindle Loc 5816)

And of course, that idiot driver will kill you just as easily in a country where no one has a choice but to drive everywhere:

the United States records a really quite spectacular 11 traffic deaths per 100,000 people every year, compared with 3.1 in the United Kingdom, 3.4 in Sweden, and 4.3 in Japan. (Kindle Loc 5826)

Finally, I enjoyed his treatment of longevity as well:

The longest-lived person that we know of was Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, in Provence, who died at the decidedly ripe age of 122 years and 164 days in 1997. She was the first person to reach not only 122 but also 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, and 121. Calment had a leisurely life: her father was a rich shipbuilder and her husband a prosperous businessman. She never worked. She outlived her husband by more than half a century and her only child, a daughter, by sixty-three years. Calment smoked all her life—at the age of 117, when she finally gave up, she was still smoking two cigarettes a day—and ate two pounds of chocolate every week but was active up to the very end and enjoyed robust health. Her proud and charming boast in old age was, “I’ve never had but one wrinkle, and I’m sitting on it.” (Kindle Loc 6072)

In any case, the book's chock full of fun reading (I'm not even using half the stuff I highlighted for future reference), and even occasionally has some actionable stuff. Recommended.

Review: Superior Spider-Man

2020-01-27T07:00:00.000-08:00

I picked up Superior Spider-Man from Comixology Unlimited after reading the first issue, which posted a heck of a fun premise: Doctor Octopus has somehow managed to take over Peter Parker's body, and has now sworn to prove himself the better Spider-Man than Peter Parker ever was.

Dan Slott was also credited with the writing for PS4's Spider-Man which made me more willing to read the entire series. The early part of the series was the best: there's a lot of "damn, he's way more organized than Peter Parker was, and wow, he's convincing me that he could be better than Peter!" He starts a startup, develops sensors so he doesn't have to physically go out on patrol, and even goes back to school to get a PhD, all while juggling all the Spiderman duties, and even stops flaking out on his personal affairs!

Later, of course, Dr. Octopus's megalomania and history of villainy gets the better of him, and he starts acquiring minions and all the artifacts of a super-villain.

The weakest part of the story is the return of Peter Parker. While there's some justification for Otto Octavius' giving up without much of a fight, it doesn't play in character for him, and none of what happens can be attributed to Peter Parker's personal attributes as the protagonist of the series. I was disappointed by that, and apparently the rest of Dan Slott's run on Spider-man is mediocre, so I was happy to stop at the end of the run, even though it would have been fun to see Peter deal with the fallout of Doctor Octopus' handling of his relationships and monetary affairs.

In any case, the series was a lot of fun (not deep!) and worth my time. Recommended.

Review: Zero G

2020-01-24T07:00:00.000-08:00

Zero G is an Audible-exclusive radio play written by Dan Wells. It's clearly intended for a younger audience (the protagonist is 10), but I listened to it anyway in case it's something that I can recommend to Bowen.

The production values are impeccable: there are multiple actors with the narrator having a different voice than everyone else. The intonation, acting, and stress are great, and the story goes out of its way to explain nearly every bit of science available, including the likely process of traversing interstellar space without FTL technology.

The world-building is iffy, though probably because it's done in service to the plot: the author clearly wanted space pirates, no matter if the economics doesn't make sense, and the plot holes in the story are big enough to drive a starship through, including a Turing-complete AI that nevertheless behaves like an idiot, and a starship strangely lacking in redundancy in life support systems.

Nevertheless, it'll be fun for me to listen to it with Bowen to see if he spots the plot holes and things that don't make sense. It's difficult in this day and age to find stories with little boys as protagonists (and an Asian boy at that --- I will note that the protagonist's voice actress is a girl, in common with many shows like The Simpsons), and I commend Amazon for bringing this into production, plot-holes and all. Recommended.

Review: Specialized BG Sport Full Finger Gloves

2020-01-23T07:00:00.000-08:00

I'd poked holes through every finger of my old long-fingered gloves, Specialized BG gloves have always fitted me quite well, though they have the unfortunate habit of changing names year over year making it impossible to find stuff that used to work for you.

Since I'm ignorant of fashion trends and don't care whether I wear this year's or last year's models, I ended up searching online and finding Specialized BG Sport Full Finger Gloves discounted at a high rate from a reputable site. They arrived and are on the thin side, which is fine for California riding down to about 40F. Below 40F I find that they don't quite provide sufficient insulation, so you're better off with more insulated gloves if you're on an extended ride. However, I have a tendency to prefer to suffer a little rather than carry more weight, so these were just right.

The gloves have tips that are supposed to work on touch-screen cell phones. In practice, the tips work sometimes, and don't work other times, depending on the temperature, humidity, phase of moon, and other irregularities. I wouldn't buy these if you needed more than 50% reliability when it comes to operating a phone.

They pack up very nicely, and fit in my handlebar bag, which means they'll be handy on tour at all times. Being light and breathable, they'll dry fast as well. I like them and will recommend them provided you don't need too much insulation. They're definitely not waterproof, but at the price I paid for them, they don't have to be. Recommended.

Review: Judge Dredd Year One

2020-01-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

Judge Dredd is pretty much of relevance only to those who grew up in the English colonies, with regular access to the weekly newsprint comic, 2000AD. Of course, from those pages came amazing talent like Alan Moore (Ballad of Halo Jones, Tharg's Future Shock), Dave Gibbons, Gary Leach, and Brian Bolland, but also iconic characters like Judge Dredd, ABC Warriors, Rogue Trooper, and Slaine the Celtic warrior.

Judge Dredd Year One appears to be a prequel, rather than a reboot. The unfortunate problem, of course, is that rather than take the "here's how Dredd became who he is" (Dredd's always been the caricature of the stoic, strong, silent fascist lawman), the story chose to portray him as being pretty much the way he's always been depicted in the comics, though perhaps a little bit too given to boast that he graduated top of the class in one-thing-or-another.

The story is pretty much classic Dredd, with time-travel, psionics,inter-dimensional travel, and lots of police action thrown in in short order. There are no new revelations, and nothing of note, which makes it completely unremarkable. Not worth your time, unless you need a strong dose of nostalgia havinga grown up with the titular character.

Reread: Saga of the Swamp Thing Books 2-6

2020-01-21T07:00:00.000-08:00

After reading Swamp Thing Vol 1, I realized that I'd never actually read the entire Alan Moore run of the Swamp Thing in one go, so I set out to do just that. Book 2 (love and death) launches the Swamp Thing's relationship with Abby Cable into being one of the most fully detailed relationships in comic books (especially in a comic book set in the DC superhero universe). It ties up all of the previous storylines neatly, and serves to prepare the reader for the next segment.

Vol 3 ("The Curse") introduces John Constantine (whose spin-off Hellblazer has proved so popular that it became a TV series) ramps into the American Gothic series of horror tropes, and while it might have been innovative at the time, has least withstood the test of time. The tropes (vampires, werewolves, etc) just don't seem that terrifying today, and I'm pretty sure even as a kid I probably wouldn't have been scared.

Vol 4 ("A murder of Crows") is marred by DC's need to tie in "Crisis on Infinite Earths" the first of many reboots. While the other tie-ins during that era were rather ham-fisted, Alan Moore cleverly stitched it into his American Gothic series by postulating that the rise of the horrors in previous issues were part of an attempt by a South American group of shaman/wizards to summon the ultimate evil. But even Moore's virtuoso can only do so much: there are many untied mysteries (for instance, the evil/shaman-wizard group is never heard from again, despite never having been dealt with properly, and one never learns why they thought summoning the ultimate evil was a good idea --- it didn't seem that they were able to control it or wanted to have anything to do with it). The introduction of most of the DC universe's mystic characters (Sargon the Sorceror, Zatana, Zatara, Doctor Fate, Deadman, the Spectre) is cursory, and while the death of some of these characters might be a big deal if you were a big fan of the DC universe, were never given sufficient build up that the pay off was worth anything. Even worse, it never feels as though their deaths made any difference to the plot, since the titular character seemed to have resolved everything without any of the sacrifices prior having done anything.

Vol 5 ("Earth to Earth") gets to start from a fresh slate. This is by far one of the most impactful (and politically courageous) volumes of its time. It features Abigail Cable being arrested for "indecent relations with a non-human", and then resolves in an all-out assault on Gotham City. One might expect the traditional "Superheroes fight and then become friends" trope, but Alan Moore, having established that the Swamp Thing is an Earth Elemental, takes that to its logical conclusion --- the outcome was never in doubt. The logical argument Batman makes for releasing Abigail was great: "What about that guy in Metropolis. Didn't he have a relationship with a human? Don't you have to arrest him too?" Perhaps the only weakness was that Luthor finds it too easy to deal with the Swamp Thing, but that's easily forgiveable, since the second half of the book deals very well with the apparent death of the titular character.

Vol 6 is a transition from the story arcs previously introduced into a series of science fiction/horror stories. It is nothing short of a tour de force, showing off Alan Moore's virtuosity. Not only does he adept to different artists, he romps from various DC comics properties (Adam Strange, Green Lantern, and even Jack Kirby's New Gods) without missing a bit. There's a science fiction story in here illustrated by Bill Sienkewicz that not only takes advantage of his art style, but also ties together time travel, the Swamp Thing, and John Varley's Titan series of books while being its own story, all in a tightly knit 23 page comic book story. Nearly every 23 page chapter in this volume would be considered the pinnacle of any other comic book writer's career, but this being Alan Moore, I still don't think it compares to Miracleman. Some of the contemporary events of this volume sets the dates (there are references to Iran-Contra), and it's quite clear in the final polemic that Moore is a bleeding-heart liberal as he takes to tasks most of humanity's valuing of money and material possession over everything else, even the ecosystem that supports humanity's existence. But reading this in 2020, none of it is outdated, and in fact, Moore's indictment of the nasty aspects of humanity still stands as accurate, salient, and relevant, remarkable for something written in the 1980s for a comic book, which explains why the books remain in print today, while many of the much hyped and marketed contemporaries (e.g., Crisis on Infinite Earths) has faded away and no longer remembered (or even ignominiously ret-conned out of existence!).

Taken altogether as a volume of work Alan Moore's Swamp Thing is a masterpiece. It contains all of his hallmarks: a rewrite of a moribound and cheesy character and flipping around and demonstrating how much could be done with the character while holding on to its initial concept. Then Moore would play around with the concepts and take everything to its logical conclusion. In many ways Alan Moore's approach in later volumes feel a lot like Joss Whedon at his best. ("Oh yeah? You think my best stuff is in the dialog? Let me show you an episode with no dialog!") There are entire issues where Moore (to various degrees of success) explores an aspect of comic book writing (e.g., there's an entire issue of Swamp Thing rendered entirely in monochromatic blue!), and by and large he succeeds. If you haven't read any of Alan Moore's work, I still think Miracleman or The Watchmen is still far more accessible (and in the case of Miracleman, I actually think is superior to Swamp Thing). But if you've skipped Swamp Thing because of its horror-B-movie reputation you owe it to yourself to ignore that reputation and read Alan Moore's run. You will not be disappointed.

Review: What Doesn't Kill Us

2020-01-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

What Doesn't Kill Us suffers from a fundamental problem with science as explained by English majors, which is that the plural of anecdotes is not data. The thesis of the book is that the Wim Hof method of continual exposure to cold temperatures along with a certain method of breathing exercises allows you to control your immune system consciously, improve your fitness, and allow you to (amongst other things) summit Kilimanjaro in 2 days without altitude acclimation (the climax of the book).

Early on in the book, there's a pursuit of a theory that brown adipose tissue (BAT, or Brown Fat) is the mechanism by which these metabolic effects work. But we quickly discover that that's a dead-end:

just under 2 weeks cold exposure almost reversed the symptoms of diabetes. As one of the pioneering researchers on BAT, van Marken Lichtenbelt predicted that the metabolic changes would come with a corresponding increase in their BAT levels, but when results from the PET/CT came back it turned out that most of men had the same levels of BAT as when they entered the study. Cold exposure had changed the men’s underlying condition, but the lightning that van Marken Lichtenbelt was trying to bottle must have come from somewhere else. (pg. 102)

After that brief flirtation with science, Carney gives up and goes whole hog into the multiple-celebrity theory of scientific proof. We get a cameo by Orlando Bloom practicing this, an exposition of Laird Hamilton's adoption of the Wim Hof techniques, an exploration of the new "tough mudder" style of obstacle course racing, and the aforementioned Kilimanjaro record-setting summit.

All of these are effectively small group studies, usually without controls, and definitely without statistical success. Every one in the sample sizes is self-selected, and though some of the anecdotes are impressive (an arthritic blacksmith regains control of his muscles, a Parkinson's sufferer halves the dosage required to keep his Parkinson's under control), they fall into the "ok, if you're this desperate, you might as well try this. You've got nothing to lose" category.

There's some evidence that our climate controlled environment might not be great for us, and that it's good to get exposure to nature, but there's no systematic teasing out of how much exposure makes a difference, and how this folklore is better than your mom's "you'll catch a cold" folklore.

As an entertaining piece of journalism the book's fine. It's also a decent airplane read. If you're desperate for a solution to your immune problems it might be worth looking into the method, but the entire account is far from scientific.

Review: Did you just eat that?

2020-01-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

You've probably heard of the 5-second rule, or the story the electric hand dryers spew germs all over the bathroom. Did you just eat that? covers all these personal hygiene topics and more from a scientific point of view, right down to publishing the procedures for replicating their studies.

Ok, most of the stuff is just common sense: yes, eating food off the floor is unsafe even if you picked it up with 1s. They trace the origin of the 5-second rule myth to Julia Child picking food that'd fallen off onto a stove top (not the floor!) and somehow that story turned into a generic rule. Wow.

The stuff that I was surprised by was that yes, electric hand-dryers are really much worse than paper towels for personal hygiene, and that yes, you need to put the toilet seat cover down before you flush or you'll aerosolized any bacteria in your stool! Also, the most bacteria-ridden item in a restaurant? The menu! Definitely wash your hands after touching the menu!

The different types of dip have different anti-bacterial properties, but surprisingly, the mechanical viscosity of the dip matters much more for preventing the spread of germs caused by double-dipping that both chocolate and cheese dips will outperform salsa, despite the salsa's higher acidity.

There are a few questions I have: if you wash your hands for 10s instead of 20s, how much bacteria is left? Those practical questions were not asked or answered in this book.

The book was a quick short read and you'll never look at a restaurant menu the same way again after after reading it. Recommended.

Reread: Saga of the Swamp Thing Book 1

2020-01-16T07:00:00.000-08:00

The thing with reading a lot of comic books is that after a while you realize that none of them can hold a candle to Alan Moore's work, or at least, your memory of Alan Moore's work. Not even Neil Gaiman, who can do character development well but couldn't plot his way out of a paper bag.

Saga of the Swamp Thing was Alan Moore's breakthrough opus in the USA. It opens with a bang, but having recently read Miracleman, I realize that there's a parallel that wasn't obvious when I read the two separated by significant amounts of time. Both reveals are followed by the appropriate protagonists becoming extremely incensed to the point of murder. It's quite clear that Moore lifted the Swamp Thing's reveal directly from his work on Miracleman.

The villain, such he is, however, is much more sympathetic than the ones in Miracleman. The setup for the second book takes its time, however, though with the benefit of hindsight one can easily see the foreshadowing happening. The American Gothic series of Swamp Thing comics was very well reviewed, but looking back, I think it's not anywhere close to Alan Moore at his peak. Nevertheless, middle of the pack Alan Moore is still way better than say, J. Michael Straczyinski. Recommended.

Review: The True Queen

2020-01-15T07:00:00.000-08:00

The True Queen is a sequel to Sorceror to the Crown. The events in this novel take place after the events of Zen Cho's earlier novel, but the lead characters are completely different. It revolves a pair of sisters who've lost their memory and are on a quest to understand their past and what caused them to forget who they were.

The novel is written in a transparent prose, and the characters at first seem like outright idiots, making you want to slap their faces for being so willfully stupid. By the middle of the novel, however, the plot becomes obvious and you understand why they had to behave the way they are. In retrospect, you can see the character flaws that caused them to behave the way they did, rather than just having to do what the plot requires.

The characters from the first book show up, but most of them are sideshows rather than main characters. Zen Cho would have made a great DM, because she kept the main characters having to do stuff, because the great heroes of the past are too busy working on other important problems. The reveal when it comes does seem inevitable, and I didn't feel cheated.

The big seams in the world building are that by unifying the magic of the Indonesian islands with that of the English faerie, you end up with a mish-mash of stuff that doesn't quite fit together, and doesn't make thematic sense. On the other hand, you could argue that it's all magic anyway, so why would you get so picky.

All in all, a great book to read while you're sick in bed. Recommended.

Review: Symphony in C

2020-01-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

Symphony in C is Robert Hazen's book about everybody's favorite element, Carbon. Far from a dry recounting of its properties, Hazen describes not just the creation of carbon in the hearts of stars and its unique place in the periodic table, but the evolution of earth's deep carbon cycle.

Interesting stories include:

The great oxygenation event affected not just the biosphere, but also minerals, as minerals reacted with the oxygen that was in the air and changed their properties.
Coal is formed during the several hundred million years in which nothing could digest cellulose. Once fungi learned to digest cellulose, trees dying no longer made coal. That's why there's a limited amount of coal in the ground.
Life on earth will continue despite humans killing themselves by making the climate too hot for primates to survive. The majority of the biosphere are made out of single-cell microbes, and those will do just fine in the absence of humans.
Carbon dating is only useful for dating items in the near past (50K years or so). Once past that, the limits to our C-14 counting methods means that we don't have accuracy any more. Furthermore, modern changes to the atmosphere (from atomic explosions to the dramatic increase in C-12 content created by our burning fossil fuels) means that future generations might not be able to easily use carbon dating to date objects from our era.

There's much more other stuff, including a discussion of various theories of how the first single-celled creatures created, to the creation of Eukaryotes. It's mostly good, though Hazen is all too fond of his "symphony" metaphor and tries to use music terminology throughout, which was annoying at times.

Nevertheless, good stuff and well worth the easy listening (I listened to the audio book edition).

Recommended.

Review: Sorcerer to the Crown

2020-01-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

Sorcerer to the Crown is a mash up of Jane Austen with a dash of the Napoleonic wars. The setting is a world in which magic exists, and that England even has a royal sorcerer as an official position. To prevent the world from drifting too far off history, the story has it such that sorcerers on both sides are forsworn from entering the battlefield.

Into this milleu, the plot revolves around a couple of outsiders: an African ex-slave who through a sequence of unlikely events becomes the royal sorcerer, and a child abandoned by her father when he drowns and brought up in a magical finishing school for girls. The two characters meet, interact, and of course have adventures that reveal all their secrets to each other.

The writing was transparent, the plot moves quickly (unlike say, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, where the plot moved at such a glacial pace that I abandoned the book long before my library loan period was up). All the words are spelled English-style, rather than American style, lending the book a nicely English flavor.

Recommended as a light airplane novel. Too many attempts to write fantasy have drowned in recent years due to annoying affectations in the writing style, so it's important to single out transparent prose when you see it.

Review: Talking to Strangers

2020-01-03T07:00:00.000-08:00

Talking to Strangers is Malcolm Gladwell's book about making sense of other people, and why we're so easily fooled. Written in his trademark, breezy style, it's a fast and easy read that nevertheless provides some color for some of the famous incidents you might have read about/heard about, while not providing any easy answers.

The story that Gladwell tells is that it's easy for people to fool us because there's a huge penalty for paranoia (the story of Harry Markopolos, who discovered that Bernie Madoff was a fraud but couldn't get the SEC to follow up on it is enlightening --- the poor guy got so paranoid that he ended up carrying a gun and becoming a recluse, convinced that everyone else was in cahoots with Madoff), while there's strong societal pressure to "go along to get along,."

The flip side of it is that if you don't conform to society's idea of how you should behave in certain circumstances (like Amanda Knox, whose roommate was murdered), then you're going to pay a penalty for not behaving that way and people will be suspicious of you no matter what, even if you're perfectly innocent.

Then Gladwell dives off into meandering themes: alcohol (Brock Turner), suicide (Sylvia Plath), and finally policing (Sandra Bland). Gladwell nicely avoids the nice and pat answers (such as the Paul Eckman micro-expression stuff which has by now been well and goodly debunked) and points out that people are so bad at judging facial expressions that a face to face interview is much worse than not meeting someone in person.

Well worth the short time you'll spending reading the book. Recommended.

Review: Permanent Record

2020-01-02T07:00:00.000-08:00

Permanent Record is Edward Snowden's account of his career with the CIA and NSA as an independent contractor/employee and how he came to become a whisteblower of mass surveillance. Maybe for someone who hasn't been in Silicon Valley for a while the story about mass surveillance might be a new one, but I think anyone who hasn't lived under a rock over the past decade or so has realized that the private sector is probably the biggest offender of privacy, and that the public in general, is pretty OK with the so-called invasion of privacy.

The deeper story for me, of course, is how much the IT outsourcing of the CIA and NSA to the private sector has probably meant that those organizations have lost control of the critical infrastructure surrounding their work.

In any case, I'm a firm advocate of the Transparent Society view of privacy. I don't think anyone should have any privacy, least of all the rich and powerful. I think that for all intents and purposes we have already lost privacy, and the right thing to do is to point the same technologies towards the politically/materialistically powerful and hold them accountable for the world we're in.

Did I enjoy the book? It was good reading, but I found Snowden's pontificating tiresome --- at no point did he point out how the alphabet-soup government agencies did anything particularly egregious, compared to what Alphabet/Facebook companies have done. Certainly if my children did what he did, my reaction would be: "What? For what gain? Who have you benefited?"

Review: Netflix's The Witcher

2019-12-30T07:00:00.000-08:00

I came to the Netflix series having read a number of the books and played The Witcher 3 all the way to the end. The series essentially adapts a number of stories from The Last Wish, and one of the best things about that first book was that it retold a number of familiar western fairy tales with a twist, such as Snow White, or Beauty and the Beast. Sure, there's an over-arching plot, but that wasn't at the forefront of that first series of short stories. (To be honest, the video game does a much better job than the books of giving you a plot that's coherent) I was suprised that the Snow White story didn't get played up as much as it was in the original.

The series deviates from the book in giving Yennefer an origin story that's not bad, but also doesn't provide any of the little twists that would have been in character from the books (or the video game, whose writers did an amazing job of providing plots that were entirely inline with the books). The sword play and choreography is well done, though not so good whenever CGI monsters are in play. The CGI is not of a high quality and will age the worst.

Episodes 4 and 6 are the best of the series in providing the sort of twists that the stories in the book are known for, while episode 3 is the classic opening sequence that everyone knows from the first video game, and is well done enough that if this was your exposure to the story it's worth watching. The episodes are only loosely connected (yes, there are 3 timelines being told simultaneously, and the plot doesn't mark what order the timelines are in).

In any case, the TV series is a successful adaptation, and sets up for a second season well. I'd recommend viewing it.

Review: Noric Flash Waterproof Camera Float

2019-12-26T07:00:00.000-08:00

The biggest problem with a waterproof camera is that you want it to float when you're snorkeling and you want it to be neutrally buoyant when diving. The Nikon W300 as I learned to my misfortune a couple of years ago sinks. With that in mind, I bought the Nordic Flash Waterproof Camera Float. The package comes with 2 floats and two quick release buckles which you then attach to the camera's anchor/neck-strap points. Even though rated for 200g, it floats well enough when attached to the Nikon W300. The float is wide enough for an adult to slide all the way up past the elbows, and the quick release is handy to drop the float if you need to dive. (That's a good way to lose the float if you're doing so in open water, however!) Together with the float, the camera is bulky enough that it tends to fall out of the pocket of my swimming shorts, but fortunately I was always able to find it again in the swimming pool. I have reasonable confidence that if I ever drop the camera again while paddle-boarding I'll be able to find it again in short order, rather than watching it disappear into the depths.

Recommended.

Review: Lifespan - Why We Age

2019-12-23T06:24:00.000-08:00

David Sinclair comes with impeccable credentials: Harvard Medical School, and editor of the journal on Aging. His book, Lifespan, is a book mostly about the research that has achieved miracles in animal trials, but have yet to make it into clinical trials for people. Basically, in the lab, achievements have been made such as regrowing the optic nerves of mice, and reversing aging in mice. Unfortunately, as you read the book you realized a lot of this stuff is stuff you heard about ages ago, such as resveratrol, which turned out to have negligible benefits for human health or lifespan. Sinclair doesn't dwell on that and moves on to brag about other achievements in the lab.

OK, what can you do to live longer? Sinclair details his diet regiment, which includes NMN, resveratrol, asprin, and metformin (yes, that drug used to treat diabetes is claimed to extend life in people without diabetes). He also follows Ray Kurzweil's regiment of getting blood draw every few months to check for biomarkers of aging. The book recommends intermittent fasting (Sinclair says he skips lunch most days), exercise (but not very much exercise --- he mentions just trying to keep his step count high and lifting weights on weekends and doing the sauna and ice baths), and as a result, despite being 50 he says he has not a single gray hair.

Part of the book is a huge diatribe about how aging should be treated as a disease and therefore deserves more funding than it toes.

All in all, the book provides health advice that you already know (eat less, fast occasionally, avoid meat and animal proteins), and doesn't seem to have high standards on actual evidence on human subjects of the drugs and supplements he recommends. As he says, there's no shortage of volunteers for his regiment, and the effects of reversing aging should be pretty obvious, so I'm now curious as to why if the animal experiments are so compelling, there isn't a rush of research into this area. Society is definitely full of billionaires who would like to live longer!

Review: Green Lantern - No Fear

2019-12-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

I'm old enough to remember that Hal Jordan was the definitive silver-age Green Lantern. Of course, then there were Guy Gardner and others introduced, just before I stopped reading the comics. Apparently, Hal Jordan got brought back just before getting a reboot in this series, so I checked it out of my Kindle Unlimited selection and discovered that the book was no good. Maybe it's because I've been binging on Alan Moore, but the book uses many pages to tell relatively simple stories, while the characters don't ever go through epiphanies or significant changes. I'll pass on continuing to read further adventures.

Review: Hellboy Seeds of Destruction

2019-12-19T07:00:00.000-08:00

The entire Hellboy collection is free on Comixology, so while I had a free trial (that I have every intention of cancelling), I decided to try it, remembering the movie with fondness. The art is crude and lacking in detail, but the characters are full of evocative references though unfortunately, with relatively little development. The lead character protagonist, is big on hitting things and not very big on philosophy, thinking, or talking, so don't expect a lot of cerebral action.

While the book has rave reviews (and obviously the movie was pretty good), it wasn't enough to keep me reading past a couple of the collected volumes. Maybe there's some good revelation or character development later on that justify the rave reviews, but not from the first two volumes of this work.

Review: Alan Moore's Top Ten

2019-12-18T07:00:00.000-08:00

I was reflecting on how none of the comic books I'd read recently came up to anywhere near Alan Moore's old work, and decided to checkout Top Ten from the Kindle Unlimited library. Top Ten imagines a world in which everyone's a superhero, and follows the travails of an imaginary police station set in such a multi-verse.

Moore as usual does a great job of throwing all the tropes into play with a density of story that does in one 22 page comic book what lesser authors would spend entire graphic novels detailing. Unfortunately, as an ensemble cast, none of the characters really do a good job of becoming a character that you're emotionally involved in. Furthermore, Moore doesn't quite take the story to the extremes that he does in say, Miracleman, which is still a better work.

Nevertheless, many of the story arcs are great, though unfortunately it feels like the series was ended before its potential could really be fulfilled.

Recommended.

Review: Amazing Spiderman - Coming Home and Revelations

2019-12-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

While I had a Comixology trial, I decided I might as well read the Straczynski Spiderman run. Coming Home is the first volume, and Revelations is the second. Not suprisingly, Straczynski's a better Spiderman writer than he is as a creator of his own worlds. With its set of rules pre-defined, Strazynski's take on Spiderman is reasonable. Even better, his improvement to the mythos was to strip away Aunt May's ignorance of who Peter Parker was, and the handling of that revelation was done delicately, without ham-handedness or easily. I was impressed in ways I wasn't for Rising Stars. Recommended.

Cabo San Lucas Trip Report

2019-12-16T07:00:00.000-08:00

I was very jealous of Arturo's whale shark snorkeling trip. The last time I tried to see whale sharks I got completely unlucky with weather and my trip got canceled. For thanksgiving when Xiaoqin suggested we go to Cabo San Lucas, I decided up front that we would try to see the whale shark. I'd arranged with Cabo Expeditions, who were kind enough to make an exception for Boen even though he was well below the age cut off. They requested that we brought our own life jacket and snorkel for Boen. I would later discover that VIP Tours out of La Paz would have taken kids of any age and supplied all the necessary gear.

I also organized a snorkeling trip for Saturday, using our hotel credits to do so. While in previous years, Bown had been happy to do ziplines, this year he stated "no ziplines." I guess the San Diego trip had made him to sea world had made him scared of heights with the roller coasters that flipped upside down which even gave me a little bit of a thrill.

For this trip, we brought along the Nikon W300, and the EOS M5 with just 2 lenses, the 22/2mm and the 50mm/1.8 with adapter. (Photo Link for the trip)

We arrived and had a free day, but immediately after that a storm blew in and cancelled our whale watching trip. Fortunately, we had a week, and promptly rescheduled for Friday and opted for a yellow submarine trip on Thursday that turned out to be not very interesting because of murky water. On Wednesday, we paid a visit to downtown Cabo San Lucas as well as San Jose de Cabo. Both obviously catered to American tourists on medical vacations, with lots of pharmacies targeted for Americans.

The Whale Shark trip happened and we did get to see a Whale Shark:

The process was a long wait, with a 2 hour drive to La Paz, and then when we cleared into the National Park waters, we were told there were 19 boats ahead of water, so the tour operator just parked the boat on a beach and we ate lunch while waiting. When we got a chance to do it, the guide would direct the captain to steer near the whale shark, and then we'd get in the water and the boat would swing around in circles until we were ready to board. Our first encounter spooked the whale shark and it swam away, so we had to get back in the boat to repeat. Fortunately, with an hour trip we were able to scan around and finally found one that was moving slowly and we got plenty of pictures.

The next day we did a snorkel trip, but the water was murky. On our last day, we were supposed to visit Cabo Pulmo for a snorkel trip, but the tour operator canceled on us despite perfect weather. My guess was that it being a Sunday they wanted the day off and just made up some excuse to not do the trip. We booked a taxi to Santa Maria beach where Boen finally managed to see some fish.

On our finaly afternoon I finally persuaded Boen and Bowen to try the water slides and they had a fun time.

We did achieve all our objectives, but I'm not sure I need to repeat this trip. The Carribean is still a better place to visit.

Review: Woom 5 off

2019-12-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

Bowen's been mountain biking enough that I bought him wider tires for his Woom 4. Of course, while corresponding with Woom about the maximum tire size I could fit on the 4, the owner casually mentioned that the Woom 5 off was going to be available soon. He met the height requirement (50") right on his birthday, so I ordered the Woom 5 off. We expected to hold on to the bike for several years between Bowen and Boen, so I ordered a pair of "road" wheels as well so we could easily swap between mountain bike and road bike configurations.

The salient features of the Woom 5 off vs the regular version (other than the $200 premium) are the carbon fork and the disc brakes. The off also comes with wider ties, suitable for mountain biking. I'm well known for my dislike of disc brakes. However, I hate the cantilever/V-brakes that come with the regular Woom bikes even more: those are even worse!

My lack of experience with disc brakes meant that putting together the bike was an unusually bad experience, culminating with Woom sending me off to the local bike shop to resolve a persistently bad brake rub situation that turned out to be partly my fault (I didn't realize that the big plastic piece that came with the wheel was the disc brake side axle washer), and partly theirs (the rotor was out of true). Woom paid for the work, which turned out not to be expensive ($18), but obviously made me feel very good about company. The spoke protector was also out of alignment, and they had sent me 2 left-sided pedals instead of a left and a right! This was an unusually poor experience, but Woom made everything right.

The bike is light and Bowen loves it. The easy stopping power of the discs meant that his hands no longer hurt on steep off-road descents, which was one of the main reasons to go with a disc brake! The wide tires are surprisingly light, and if you're not a stickler like me for maximizing your kid's experience with cycling, I'm not sure it's worth the expense of an extra set of wheels to get the lower rolling resistance of road bike tires. (Though I could be wrong --- if Bowen decides to go touring on his single this would be an essential purchase anyway!)

Color me impressed. It's extra expensive, but if you have more than one kid in the family, it's probably worth springing for the disc brake version of the Woom bikes rather than the regular. The reduction in hassle compared to cantilever/V-brakes in itself would be worth it.

Recommended!

Review: Rising Stars Compendium

2019-12-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

I tried to find Rising Stars after reading Straczinski's autobiography, and to my surprise it wasn't available from the library. Fortunately, it was available through Comixology Unlimited program with a 30 day free trial, so I checked it out that way.

Good Superhero books are difficult to write: all the tropes have been explored at this time, and the giants of the field, Watchmen and Miracleman (both written by Alan Moore) have yet to be surpassed even decades after Alan Moore has left the field.

Unfortunately, Straczinski's Rising Stars doesn't come close to any of the giants. It's not even as good as Frank Miller's run on Daredevil collected in Born Again.

The premise of the story is that a single event caused the birth of a hundred odd kids with super powers, and of course the government gathers them together and brings them up together. The consequence of this one time event is explored. There are a few interesting twists (such as a person who's invulnerable but has no other super powers), but mostly there aren't any interesting new twists save for a single villain whose multiple personality disorder manifests her powers.

The story starts with a murder mystery, but the murder mystery is unfair (the power behind it was never disclosed to you until after the fact), and the resolution to it is unsatisfying. Then the last third of the book gets really hokey and unbelievable. You might think that this is an unreasonable expectation for someone reading a comic book to expect believability, but in this case it was so egregious it was dumb. (no, radiation poisoning is not a contagious disease!) To top it off the ending is hokey and dumb.

I can't recommend this book. I don't understand why it got any of the acclaim it did.