I’m fascinated by the hermit kingdom, North Korea. It’s the world’s most oppressive government, has run its country literally into starvation and ruin and horribly abuses its citizens. And yet it persists as this somewhat stable if entirely isolated country. Also it has nuclear weapons, that commands some attention. So I’ve read a few things about North Korea in the past year, here’s some recommendations.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick. A completely fantastic book by an LA Times journalist who has devoted years to North Korea reporting. She tells the stories of six defectors from North Korea, ordinary citizens from the large industrial town Chongjin. It’s a long, heartbreaking read of life in the DPRK around 1980 – 2000. She does a fantastic job capturing what life is like in a totalitarian society, how people really believe in their Dear Leader and the absolute superiority of North Korean communism. At least until the mid-90s when a multi-year famine caused by government mismanagement killed a million or so people and severely starved the rest. Very upsetting to read despite the author’s compassion and skill at nuanced writing; I only made it through because I knew it would end with people escaping North Korea. (Although even that escape is a mixed blessing).

The In Focus photojournalism blog: Inside North Korea • Kim Jong Il, 1942-2011 • North Korea Mourns Kim Jong Il • Glimpses of Humanity in Choreographed North Korea • North Korea Prepares for a Milestone Year. Pretty much all images coming out of North Korea are heavily censored, but even so there’s a lot of amazing photojournalism done by visitors. Alan Taylor’s well edited photo collections tell amazing stories.

The Orphan Master’s Son: A Novel by Adam Johnson. Not so much about North Korea as a book set in North Korea. And with a lot of literary liberties, the author is too clever by half. Still there’s something excellent in the alienation of the story and the characters against the backdrop of North Korean totalitarianism, it was a good read.

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle. A lovely graphic novel, a French Canadian’s memories of a two month stay in Pyongyang. It’s a bit of a light-hearted treatment considering how awful the place is, but it’s nicely drawn and I appreciated the author’s personal story of his relationship to such a strange place.

An extra set of links.. North Korean Economy Watch, an analysis blog. Korean Central News Agency of DPRK, the official government press outlet. Daily NK, critical news published by defectors and other dissidents. Mourning King Jong-il, a propaganda video; from what I read in Demick’s book these expressions of grief are genuine if coerced. I have more North Korea links, too.

It’s hard to understands how North Korea persists, how Kim Il-Sung’s family maintains control to a third generation and how the country still manages to barely function despite years of complete economic collapse. A key part of it is the utter isolation of the place, convincing most of its citizens that life in North Korea is the best in the world. But that façade is failing between the mass starvation, the rise of communication with China (both illegal trade and cell phones), and the increasing influence of black market DVDs and radios.

Ken and I had a nice little vacation last week, up near Grass Valley and Nevada City. It’s up in the Gold Country, in the Sierra Foothills northeast of Sacramento, about three hours drive from San Francisco. In the past we’ve enjoyed going up to Placerville; same idea except the towns are bigger and have more to offer up north.

Not that city life is the primary reason to go to Nevada County. It’s quiet up there, and beautiful; a nice escape from the city. Still, nice to have amenities like grocery stores and restaurants. New Moon is good for fine dining and South Pine Cafe is a great casual breakfast / lunch place.

We had a great stay in this log cabin, a bit south of Grass Valley in Alta Sierra. Really comfortable place and big, could easily host 6+ for a week. Nice creek in the back, chirping frogs, wood stove, hot tub, hammocks, and a well furnished kitchen.

We should stop using the words “theft” and “stealing” when talking about unlicensed use of intellectual property. Those words should be reserved for physical property, for things limited by scarcity.

A bunch of the news coverage of Oracle v Google talks about Google “stealing” Java or the “theft” of Oracle’s intellectual property. It is common to talk about downloading music or video as “stealing” or “piracy”. That language is prejudicial. What Oracle is really claiming is that Google has used some of its patents and copyrighted material without a license. Downloading Game of Thrones is not “theft”, it’s “unlicensed use”.

I think copyrights and (appropriate) patents are important; I’ve made my own living by creating intellectual property. One of the great challenges of the Information Age is figuring out how to control intellectual property. But applying 3000+ years of physical property law to intellectual property doesn’t make sense. When I take your cow, I deprive you of the use of your cow. When I copy a song I don’t deprive anyone of the song. Intellectual property is fundamentally different from physical property. We should use different words when describing their misuse.

The Keurig B60 single cup brewer makes good coffee. I’m not much of a coffee snob and am perfectly happy with any decent American brewed coffee. For me and Ken, this K-Cup brewer gizmo is better than a generic drip coffee pot.

The main advantage is convenience. We can have a cup of hot fresh coffee in about three minutes; faster if the machine is already on. Any time of day, without the hassle of making a fresh pot (or, guiltily, microwaving leftover coffee). The other advantage is consistent quality. The coffee just tastes better, I think partly because of freshness and partly because of precise temperature control during brewing.

The downside is cost. Even in bulk, my preferred coffee is about $0.65 / 10oz mug. That’s about double what I paid for drip coffee made with decent beans from my local coffee shop. You can use your own cheaper grounds in refillable K-Cups (the ekobrew works OK), but a bit of grit gets through and it’s a hassle to fill and clean. The brewer itself is also expensive, but it’s a surprisingly complicated and well made machine.

Keurig sells a confusing variety of K-Cup systems and now has a new incompatible system called Vue. The B60 special edition looked like the right feature set to me, although I’m already wishing I had some way to hook it directly to my plumbing so I don’t have to fill a water tank.

Good reading: The Hunger Games Trilogy, young adult novels roughly in the category of Harry Potter but way more interesting. There’s a movie coming March 23 but I worry that it won’t capture the emotional complexity that makes the books so good. So read them! It’s even free on Amazon if you own Kindle hardware and are a Prime subscriber.

The setup for the books is not very promising. Future dystopia, subjects are forced to send children every year to a fight to the death for the amusement of the ruling class. It seems like Most Dangerous Game / Running Man / Arena, a cliché action story. And there’s a risk that’s what the movie will be.

But the books are so much more. There’s an enormous emotional complexity in the main character, Katniss. She’s a badass hunter and is completely capable of killing her competitors to survive. But she’s also horribly conflicted about it and has a really subtle relationship with her situation in the world. And boyfriends, some good writing there, way beyond the pathetic girly stuff in a novel like Twilight. It’s rare to read something so complex and alienating in books for teenagers. Really well done.

The first book is the best but the story payoff in the third book is worth the time.

Skyrim is one of the finest computer games ever made. I was curious how people played through the game, so I set up some scripts to monitor achievement completion on the Xbox and drew graphs of how people progressed through the game.

The graph above shows completion of the main story quests; as a bar chart (on Jan 17) and as a time series in days since release. Unbound is 100% because the statistics only count players who’ve completed one achievement. There’s a big falloff after “The Way of the Voice”; only 57% of players started Act II of the game. And 34% of players finished the game after two months; most players who get as far as Elder Knowledge in Act III complete the whole game.

I’ve made graphs for all 50 achievements. The bar charts show which parts of the game are popular. For instance 74% of players joined the Companions compared to only 45% joining the Dark Brotherhood. I suspect that’s mostly due to game structure; it’s hard to avoid meeting the Companions at Whiterun but the player has to actively seek out the Dark Brotherhood. Faction completion is also interesting; mages complete their faction line the most while precious few people finish the Thieves Guild. Only ⅓ of players got married; I think the option may have been too hidden. I’m impressed 12% of players got Oblivion Walker; it takes a significant commitment to get 15 Daedric Artifacts and if the player screws up they can make it impossible.

Unfortunately the time series graphs don’t give a lot of extra insight. There’s a big dip in completion percentages around Christmas, when a bunch of new players started playing. But the basic velocity of completion, the slope of these graphs, is about the same for all of the achievements. In retrospect that’s not surprising but I was hoping it would be more interesting.

Some caveats about the data. It’s Xbox only, a self-selected subset of players that True Achievements tracks. The data is daily and has a few bad days I fudged out. This graph isn’t really a finished work, but honestly the data didn’t turn out to be very interesting so I’m done with it.

A clean rip of the CDs was a great place to begin. I took all my discs to ReadyToPlay, a service down in Palo Alto. They aren't the cheapest (I paid $1.40/disc) but they came well recommended and their website does a good job explaining how they take extra care with metadata. I was really happy with the result of their work and enthusiastically recommend them.

ReadyToPlay's setup is a few robots loading discs into CD-ROM drives with dbPowerAmp doing the ripping and conversion. They ripped to Apple Lossless (m4a); now that Apple has opened the format it seems the best choice. ReadyToPlay licenses high quality metadata from All Music Guide and other sources so album and artist names are much more accurate than I've seen from free sources. They also do some hand editing and data entry as well as careful handling of the CDs and cases. Money well spent.

ReadyToPlay got me started with a metadata schema. Just 18 genres without silly micro classification. Artist vs. Album Artist vs. Composer is a headache, particularly with Classical music, but iTunes mostly does the right thing even if Sonos is a bit confusing. One clever thing ReadyToPlay did was stuff detailed genre info into the Grouping tag, so while Autechre shows up as "Electronic" in the basic Genre I can also find it in iTunes via a search for "Techno" or "IDM" or "Experimental".

I didn't really need to edit any of the ReadyToPlay metadata, it was correct from the start. The other music was more of a mess. I'm surprised at how poorly labelled Bleep and Amazon's early MP3 sales were. It took a few hours to collapse down the genres, fix up mislabeled album titles, and try to figure out what some of these unlabeled BBC Essential Mix tracks really were. But all that work is done and now I've got a great, easy to use music collection.

Anyone want to buy several boxes of used CDs?

Tech companies give employees stock (or options) on hiring. The weird thing about that compensation is that the stock grant is generally fixed at the time of hire, before the company really knows anything about the new person. The resulting compensation is never really fair. Sometimes a great hire ends up not working out and ends up with more stock than they deserve. More often, an undervalued hire ends up doing great and it's a shame he or she doesn't have more stock. At Google my impression was most employees' stock grants were entirely uncorrelated with their impact at the company; grant size had way more to do with hire date.

Companies can try to fix inequitable compensation by rewarding good employees with more stock. But those grants always come much later when the strike price is higher and are generally much smaller than the initial grant. So extra stock after being hired seldom really works out. It's much easier to give a good employee a cash raise. The corollary to this is as a new hire, if you can afford to you should negotiate for more stock vs. more cash. Because while you can always get more cash later if you do well, you can seldom get more stock.

Another ugly aspect of the Zynga story is the use of "Google chef situation" as a metaphor for an employee getting too much stock. That refers specifically to Charlie Ayers, Google's chef 1999–2006, who reportedly made a giant pile of money from his stock options. To anyone who suggests he doesn't deserve that compensation: fuck off. Charlie worked incredibly hard at Google and did a great job growing a kitchen from one meal a day for 40 people to three squares for 10,000+ people. That kitchen had a huge impact on the success of the company; Google got an extra 200 hours' work a year out of employees because we wanted to eat at work rather than go out. Charlie personally was responsible for the kitchen's success. I assume "chef situation" is some sort of class distinction, that chefs don't deserve as much compensation as the hallowed engineers. That's disgusting.

Eleven Madison is operating at a very high standard right now. If you live in New York or are going to visit make the effort to go: you need to reserve weeks in advance. They received four stars in the NYT two years ago and just recently got 3 stars and 5 forks in the NY Michelin guide. I had dinner there a year ago right after they switched to the current tasting menu and it was very good but not transcendent. In the past year they've found their stride and it is now as good as dining gets, anywhere in the world. Go.

Our meal consisted of some twelve amuse bouche followed by a four course tasting menu meal. The menu is deliberately abstract, just a list of main themes like "Lamb" or "Apple" that are elaborated based on the staff's reading of the diner's desires. An open mind is useful but they're not playing any games, no need to fear some unwelcome surprises. The cooking leans towards traditional, not molecular gastronomy trickery, and excels by being very well executed.

Langoustine: Marinated with Grapes, Fennel, and Marcona Almonds
White Truffle: Tortelli with Fontina Val d'Aosta and Chestnuts
Guinea Fowl: Roasted with Pear, Salsify, and Foie Gras
Apple: Ice Cream with Toffee Cake, Walnuts, and Caramel

Foie Gras: Terrine with Plum, Bitter Almond, and Umeboshi
Lobster: Poached with White Truffles, Autumn Mushrooms, and Spinach
Guinea Fowl: Roasted with Pear, Salsify, and Foie Gras
Blue Cheese: With Pear, Chestnut Honey, and Bitter Greens

1995 Meursault Les Meix Chavoux (Domaine Roulot)
1996 Corton-Bressandes (Domaine P. Dubreuil-Fontaine Père & Fils)

Sadly I have no record of the various amuse, they were extraordinary in their variety and complexity. The main courses were nicely paced and undiluted, each enjoyable and complete without being overwhelming, Often at a fine meal like this by the time you get to the poultry you're tired and just want to stop eating; Eleven Madison avoided fatigue.

But food is only half of fine dining, the room and service is the other half. And it's extraordinary. Terrifically personal and friendly service, not too formal, but very professional. I'd gotten the reservation by gushing on about having been to Humm's restaurant in San Francisco and was impressed the staff all knew my story. We even got a little visit to the kitchen, always fun, amazing to see as many cooks in the kitchen as there were diners in the room. All working precisely, neatly, for our pleasure.

Chef Humm is buying the restaurant from Danny Meyer, along with his General Manager Will Guidara. That's probably good news, but I'm a bit concerned that they are also taking on food and beverage at a nearby hotel. The best chefs always expand their empires, it's natural for his career, but I fear the risk of diluting his excellence. Did you know Wolfgang Puck used to do something other than frozen pizzas? They are also publishing a cookbook due Nov 11 (see video). We saw a pre-release copy. It looked beautiful and entirely impractical for the home cook, more of a monument to his art like Keller's French Laundry Cookbook.