I was explaining blogging once to Dad, that it was sort of like a diary but on line for the whole world (or any subset that's interested) to read, and he asked, "Do you tell the truth?" Well, no. He has a point. There's some discomfort levels I just can't get past in a forum as public as this, so I certainly don't tell the whole truth. Hopefully enough to get by.
So I've not been all here this month because it's been brutal and exhausting and I'm very, very tired. So let's talk about the iris and the anniversary:
Out in the front yard we've a triangle of iris that are putting on a show this year the likes of which we've not seen this decade we've lived here. They started as a little clump left to us by the former owner, frankly unloved. Lissa has loved them extensively, separating and spreading them until one whole corner of the yard is well groomed iris country. She's added a lot of new bulbs, but the patch is still dominated by the purple that we started with.
Last year we added an automatic drip irrigation system, which means that for the first time the iris got consistent water instead of the haphazard hand-watering we’ve always done. Then this spring things were unusually wet. Between the sprinklers and the spring rains, the iris seem content and willing to show their gratitude with a magnificent display.
The other great thing April had to offer was Mom and Dad's 50th anniversary:
Lissa and Nora, with a smidge of help from me, threw a party for them and their friends over at their place, then the five of us went out to a nice dinner. It was sweet and lovely and they seem both happy and content with a fine marriage and genuine lifetime spent together.
Oh yeah. And my kid and her chums at the Albuquerque High School drama department did King Lear. Nora gets pissed if one suggests that that is an ambitious thing for a student drama group to do, and I've come to realize that she's right. They do tough stuff all the time, and real work, kids or not. So I'll just say I was immensely proud to see my daughter up there on stage, and King Lear's an ambitious undertaking for anyone.
See, April 2004 wasn't so bad after all, was it?
My friend Mark, whose battle with off-roaders on his land and RS 2477 I've discussed here previously, pointed me to another good site, the Property Owners for Sensible Road Policy.
Back in February, I posed the question of whether stopping exercise triggers depression in a regular exerciser.
Comes a blog commenter two months later with a citation:
· Mondin, G,. Morgan, W., Piering, P. Stegner, A, Stotesbery, C., Trine, M. Wu, M. (1996), Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, Williams & Wilkins, 28, 1199-1203The consequences of exercise deprivation for regular exercisers was studied over a 3 days, with ten volunteers. Regular was defined as at least 45 minutes 6 or 7 times a week. State and Trait Anxiety (STAI) was assessed, plus tension, depression, mood, anger, vigor, fatigue and confusion. Increases in state anxiety, mood disturbance, tension confusion and depression were reported at significant levels.
Lissa and I went to a car show Saturday. This was an unexpected pleasure.
We went because the article in the newspaper mentioned restored travel trailers, which are a hoot. It's always been a fantasy of Lissa's to buy a little old '50s or early '60s trailer and restore it. So we drove on over to Rio Rancho to see the car show that had the trailers. And the trailers were nice, for sure, six of 'em lovingly restored. But the car show - that was the attraction.
As we walked up and down the rows of impeccable autos, it occurred to me that this was some sort of quintessential American art form - the perfect upholstery, the shiny lacquered paint. The aesthetic is rich and complex - why a load of old '60s Mustangs, but no Astin Martins? Why a Dodge Challenger ("the last American hero, the electric sintar, the demi-god, the super driver of the golden west") rather than a Jaguar? And the wheels, almost always mags, rather than the stock? And one of these.
Jeff's post on the urchin with the "Boycott CVS sign" sent me googling to find out who was boycotting CVS and why.
For our European readres, CVS, in addition to representing a state-of-the-old-art software version control tool, also is the name of a chain of drugists in the U.S. It's a rather large chain, and as such it seems at one time or another to have offended all sides of the cultural spectrum here in the United States.
At some point (the date is unclear and I'm having to rely on google's cache to resurrect the history), some fundamentalist Christians launched a boycott after CVS cut off its funding for the Boy Scouts. According to the fundamentalists, CVS was reacting to the Boy Scouts' stand on homosexuality:
For the past several years, various businesses have ended their support of the Boy Scouts of America by cutting off their funding. CVS Pharmacy is one of them. The reason was because of the Boy Scout's stance on not allowing homosexuals into the organization as scout leaders or scouts. We are encouraging all Christians to boycott any business that does this. This is not only an attack against the Scouts. It is also a direct attack on conservative Christians, the authority of the Bible, and our Lord.
More recently, the opposite side of our great cultural divide launched a boycott of their own after a CVS pharmacist refused to fill a woman's prescription for birth control pills.
One imagines that, the chain having apparently offended everyone, no one now shops at CVS.
A new variation on comment spam. Rather than the usual porn or prescription meds, today I got one from an artist using comment spam to help peddle her paintings. I almost left it. Almost.
Dano -
Remember where I said it was a good sign when Armstrong led out Max van Heeswijk's sprint at the Tour of Murcia? This is even better news - when the Texan wins the sprint himself:
Who knew the boy could sprint?
If you saw my dog, Sadie, as she scopes me out in the morning when I put on my shoes, you'd think the answer to the question is obvious. She's always checking for the running shoes. When it's clear we're going running, she goes ballistic.
But does she really have "fun?" Or is this just a result of evolution, a dance between her genes and mine in which her ancestors enjoyed some benefit (my ancestors fed them?) when they exhibited what looked like enthusiasm for going hunting, or out into the fields for the work day.
It's a question I think about a lot, so I was totally intrigued by a piece in the April 8 Nature by Clive D. L. Wynne, from the University of Florida.
Wynne's taking on the question of whether it is useful to anthropomorphize animal behaviors. It's a distinguished tradition:
The complexity of animal behaviour naturally prompts us to use terms that are familiar from everyday descriptions of our own actions. Charles Darwin used mentalistic terms freely when describing, for example, pleasure and disappointment in dogs; the cunning of a cobra; and sympathy in crows. Darwin's careful anthropomorphism, when combined with meticulous description, provided a scientific basis for obvious resemblances between the behaviour and psychology of humans and other animals. It raised few objections.
It's also, Wynne argues, wrong.
He's doing something careful here, and I am not. Wynne is looking for some sort of rigorous framework, while I'm just having a primitive relationship with my four-legged running buddy. I'm doing what he'd label "naive anthropomorphism" ("the impulse that prompts children to engage in conversations with the family dog") while he's talking about something much more rigorous. "Critical anthropomorphism," in Wynne's formulation (he's quoting Gordon Burghardt here) "uses the assumption of animal consciousness as a 'heuristic method to formulate research agendas that result in publicly verifiable data that move our understanding of behaviour forward.'"
And when you get into the realm of consciousness vs. hardwired behaviorism, that's when things get sticky. It's really a central debate of contemporary philosophy - how one might distinguish, as Kwame Anthony Appiah puts it, between a robot and our mom.
Suppose the computer in question is in a robot, which, like androids in science fiction, looks exactly like a person. It's a very smart computer, so that its "body" responds exactly like a particular person: your mother, for example. For that reason I'll call the robot "M." Would you have as much reason for thinking that M had a mind as you have for thinking your mother does?
Of course that's such a canned example that we surely have a way out by saying that of course no such robot exists, and we can tell the difference between silicon-based machines and Mom, and of course Mom has consciousness and the computer doesn't, you silly argumentative philosopher you.
But what about Sadie? How might I distinguish between whether the run is "fun," in the same way that our human consciousness experiences "fun," and a hardwired behaviorist exhibition of fun-like symptoms? Wynne's not arguing, I think, that Sadie doesn't have consciousness, merely when we say that she does, we're not saying anything terribly useful in terms of understanding what's up.
For me, I've solved it at a more practical level. Of course she's having fun. The poor dog can barely sit still for me to put the leash on her. What else could it be?
I guess I'm just a naive anthropomorphist.
The bird, that is, silhouetted against the fading light of dusk while it sipped from the feeder at my back window. Lissa saw one at our front window where the feeder goes over the weekend, but this is the first I've seen this year.
Murray: I don't know how you'll duplicate this in Munich, but there's a wonderful running shoe store here in Albuquerque, Heart and Sole (sorry, ignore the pun) that offers a good solution to your problem. They've got a treadmill in store with a video camera at foot level. The guy talks to you, guesses about a pair of shoes that might address your biomechanical issues, then has you run while he videotapes your foot fall. Then he plays it back, freeze-framing and stepping slowly through your entire stride to figure out if the shoe is addressing your problem. (And we all have problems.)
It resulted in the best running shoe fit I've ever had. Obviously, a plane ticket to Albuquerque is probably out of the question, but there must be someone in a great city like Munich that's doing this.
Bought a pot of purple pansies. That is a fine, fine sentence - a sentence worthy of carving in something, or perhaps accompanying on a bongo.
Glynn: I'm with Alec. I think having an abstracted version of a long post is a solution, not a problem. This was part of my solution, in fact to the Malkovich effect. There's no sense burdening Planet Gnome with one of my thousand-word blathers about non-Gnome topics. If there was a Planet Climate Change or Planet Slow Bike Racer some of my writing might be more appropriate in an RSS feed. Maybe a multiplicity of feeds is the answer, targeted to a variety of audiences? I know. Custom feeds! Let the person pulling the feed pick what bits they want. (Implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Well, I do think Jeff's work is critical to the future of humanity, but no, I didn't mean "genome."
David Appell has an amazing and provocative interview with biologist Aubrey de Grey, a "biogerentologist" who thinks a 5,000-year human life span is within reach:
TR: 5,000 years? That seems pretty outlandish.De Grey: I get that reaction a lot - my estimate gives people the conceptual bends. But if you go through the logic step by step, you'll see that it's virtually inevitable that we will attain that sort of life expectancy in that sort of timeframe, just so long as two things work out. First, we will have to develop first-generation rejuvenation therapies by 2050 or sooner. Secondly, the value we put on life will have to rise as our anticipated lifespan increase, which has happened in the past. I'm not a sociologist, but I think this second development is very likely, given the first.
So, what remains for me to explain is why the development of first-generation rejuvenation therapies - which I'll define as ones that can be applied to people in their 60s and increase their lifespan by at least 30 years - is enough to give people who are 25 or younger at the time those therapies arrive a lifespan not limited by aging in any way. The answer can be given in one word: bootstrapping. Thirty years is an absolute eternity in science, so it is nigh on inconceivable that the second-generation therapies (which, let's say, give another 30 years on top of what the first-generation ones give) will be so long in coming that the beneficiaries of first-generation therapies will miss out on them. And of course the same applies to subsequent-generation therapies ad infinitum.
Raises all kinds of pretty interesting questions.
Second race of the season. This time no major mistakes, except for maybe not being quite fast enough. But that's a deeper issue.
Damn fast fun, though.
The "E" division is essentially for novices, and seven of us lined up this morning at 8 a.m. for the KY Crit. The course was about a mile, a loop around a business park near my office on the north end of town. Saturday, pretty much no one around except the security guard at the U.S. Forest Service building ("This is federal property. You can't park here.") and a bunch of grumpy landscapers annoyed that the "two-wheeled idiots" were making it hard for them to pile a bunch of rocks on a slope of dirt.
It was really a six-person race, with the seventh - a determined teenage girl - off the back immediately and riding her own race. After the debacle of the start three weeks ago on Route 6 (careful readers will recall I got dropped before I'd even started pedalling), my primary goal was to go out with whoever went out the fastest. That ended up being all of us, and we hung together as a clump of six for the entire race.
My secondary goal was to be cautious in the corners, not being an experienced racer. Every time around the course, we'd end up flying down the back straight (see map above) at close to 30 mph, then have to brake into a 90 degree left. Every time, I'd swing wide, fall off the back through the corner and have to hammer to get back on. Then another hard left, off the back, hammer into an uphill witih a wind. This was not optimal, but ended up working fine, and I ended up hanging onto the back the of the train the entire race.
A couple of times, one or another rider would try to attack on the uphill right before the "S" (I believe the bike boys call it a "chicane"), but none of the attacks stuck and we always ended up back together. Until, of course, the last lap.
I know when the attacks came pretty much everybody out there was stronger than me, but I just grabbed a wheel and went on the final run through the S, moved up into fourth place, but couldn't hold it and ended up in fifth by half a bike length or so.
Average speed for the race - 22 mph.
I stuck around for part of the D race, then came home, changed, and took Mom and Dad out to watch the end of the C's and the B's.
The interesting difference was not so much the speed - the D's were averaging perhaps 24, the B's 25 - but the bike handling. We sat our lawn chairs on the inside of the second bend of the "S" on the front side of the course, and those B riders were flying through without even touching their brakes. The only slowing came when they backed off of the pedals. Amazing.
The baseball gods are benificent - fickle, but ultimately benificent.
Malcolm sent me Tim Bray's ode to opening day, and we did our best here in Albuquerque this afternoon to launch a season. It was just an exhibition game, but we got to watch the local nine, our AAA Isotopes, trounce the World Champion Florida Marlins.
It was not exactly ideal baseball weather, but The Big Storm that's been pounding us all weekend saw fit to let up long enough to get in some baseball. It was cold and windy, and I was very glad Lissa was smart enough to bring a blanket.
It was sold out, but a pair of tickets materialized before my baseball-starved eyes Friday afternoon, then additional magic about 45 minutes before game time delivered an upgrade to box seats up in the club section behind home plate.
Our sharp young shortstop, Wilson Valdez, stole two bases in the first inning, then another two in the second. When he came to bat in the third, the first pitch from the Marlins' Darrin Oliver seemed to sorta slip, tailing in the direction of right directly at Valdez, who danced out of the way. The young home plate umpire wandered mound-ward to have a chat with Oliver about the issues associated with having pitches slip in situations like that, while Valdez just stood there with a huge grin on his face, like he was thinking, "Shit, I just got thrown at by a big-leaguer!"
Bray captures nicely what this is all about, with green lawn and clean new uniforms and the great promise of T-ball in spring:
Tomorrow’s the first game; in entry-level tee-ball, there are no umpires and score is not kept. But, The Game Is The Thing.
Play ball.
So the ride was great.
Aside from the fact that my feet were soaked through 10 minutes into a three-hour ride.
And the fierce howling wind in our faces climbing the Tramway hill.
And the driving rain at the top (and the gust there that literally nearly blew both of us off of our bikes).
And the bit where Jaime went down going across the railroad tracks, that wasn't so keen.
And the part where I got a flat tire, rolling down Paseo del Norte at speed, that was a little disconcerting (and sitting on the sidewalk in the wind fixing it, and having it start raining, that was a little uncomfortable).
And the way Jaime's mobile kept ringing all morning, on account of he's the photo editor and there was a lot of storm-inspired photojournalism to be managed, that was a bit of a distraction.
OK, but that's all just whining (or maybe bragging). Because despite the problems, it was an amazing day.
The Rio Grande was running high and looking like a river (which it doesn't often these days), there was mud and water everywhere, clouds slamming down and breaking open, pouring over the mountains from the east, boiling up the valley from the south, swirling and ripping and tearing. Somethin' about being out there in the middle of all that on a bike. Pretty much complete fun.
So here's the dilemma.
I just did the 7 a.m. check on my rain gauge, and we got 1.65 inches in the last 24 hours. (This is a desert. That's a lot.) The forecast calls for lots more rain all day, and the radar shows big bands of wet all up and down the Rio Grande Valley, as far as its electronic eye can see.
The plan was a long and serious bike ride today. It looks as though at least the start of the ride will fit between bands of rain, but we're almost certain to get soaked. On the other hand, with that much rain it's bound to be interesting out there - the river swollen, the arroyos flooded, etc.
It's a discomfort/adventure tradeoff.
update: It's a go. Said Jaime, "Just think. The competition probably isn't out there." I just want you to remember that he said that, not me.
Years ago, my friend Frank Zoretich wrote a wonderful piece about that lovely smell you get in the desert when a summer thunderstorm hits. If I recall it right, the story documented Frank's unsuccessful search for an explanation.
Now comes The Wordsmith, with not only a word for it ("petrichor" - the April 2 listing if it's already off of his front page) but a possible explanation in the usage he quotes:
"Petrichor, the name for the smell of rain on dry ground, is from oils given off by vegetation, absorbed onto neighboring surfaces, and released into the air after a first rain."Matthew Bettelheim; Nature's Laboratory; Shasta Parent (Mt Shasta, California); Jan 2002.
update: Michael Quinion has a delightful discussion of petrichor among his weird words:
The word comes from Greek petros, a stone, plus ichor, from the Greek word for the fluid that flows like blood in the veins of the gods. So the word means something like "essence of rock". Alas, it is rarely encountered.
A word of advice this campaign season. If you believe enough in a candidate to put their bumper sticker on your car, be on your best behavior out there on the highways. You're now an ambassador!
Whoah ... that guy that cut me off, in the Cadillac with the Bush/Cheney bumper sticker ... what an asshole!
Just yesterday I was praising Tim Noakes' The Lore of Running to a friend who recently started training to run his first marathon. Then this morning over breakfast I stumbled across a fascinating article in the March 20 New Scientist (paper only, not the web) about new research Noakes and colleague Alan St. Clair Gibson have been doing on the nature of physical exhaustion in endurance athletes. They think it's all in our brain, acting as a sort of "central governor" to get our body to slow down well before we actually reach the point of physical exhaustion, essentially leaving us with enough in reserve to flee if there happens to be a lion around the next corner. One can see how that would have been an evolutionary advantage back in the day.
Noakes is this strange and wonderful South African ultra-distance runner and exercise physiologist. The Lore of Running is one of my all-time favorite books, though an odd choice for the list. I love it because (much like another favorite, Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire) it is a work of great personal passion in which one can easily see the seams and stitches used to pull the passion together into a book. Those seams, imperfections in the book's assembly, make it far more interesting.
Noakes' careful obsession is with finding the science underlying the lore that has built up over the years among coaches and athletes about what works and what doesn't. That's what led him to the central governor theory - an anomaly that the science couldn't quite explain. As Rick Lovett explains in New Scientist:
Timothy Noakes will never foreget the day he encountered the hill from hell. It was 1976 and he was running the gruelling Comrades Marathon, an annual 90-kilometre road race between Durban and Pietermaritzburg in South Africa. About 20 kilometres from home he rounded a bend and saw a steep incline he hadn't known was there. Even before he started climbing, he suddenly began to feel overwhelmingly tired.
The conventional wisdom, Lovett explains, is that fatigue is a creature of the muscles themselves. But Noakes' new research suggests that it's the brain, taking cues from the muscles well before they are actually fatigued and giving us that exhausted shutdown signal early enough that we don't kill ourselves, and that we don't leave our muscles with too little in reserve to get away from the lion if need be.
This hypothesis explains a lot. The governor lets up, for example, when you know you're nearing the finish line of a race. The success of interval training is explained by the brain learning better where the actual point of physical exhaustion lies. By regularly pushing up near it, your brain is quickly trained to have a better idea of where the boundary actually might lie. Noakes' tests on a group of cyclists, as explained by Lovett, found the performance improvement from interval training came much too quickly to be explained by a physiological change. And the coach's lore that one should always know the course of a race - that's brain, not body.
My copy of The Lore of Running is old. Guess it's time to go out and buy the latest edition, which talks about the central governor theory.
From my other blogworld, a lovely image from Mars via Larry Crumpler, with commentary.
