Happy birthday, Joe

To Joe, on the far left, fond birthday wishes. Here's to the occasional scientific banter or dry wordplay, whenever it might find us. Cheers.

... and to blogger.com, a thanks for allowing authors to backdate posts by a day.

Julian says "where's my uncle?" and flings some cereal mush Westward.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

I recently read Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everthing, a pop-science book that has languished on my bookshelf untouched for the past year of two. The following a low-effort review.

Short History was a fun read: a page or two is spent on each of many, many scientific discoveries and events, largely post-Newtonian. The pace is unsettling, and nearly as much is said about Cavendish's social behavior as his gravitating spheres. Nonetheless, for a reader like me, who already knows a good chunk of the science, the details and connections amongst events and eventors are amusing.

I would enjoy a version of the same stories written for an audience with a higher level of scientific competence. The anecdotes are fun, but accompanying every argument about orders of magnitude with some simile of the number of sugar cubes to fill giants stadium wears on the reader. Can't we just say the Earth's crust is X% the thickness of its diameter and get on with it? That said, having some background in physics and biology (and enough of each to skim over the brief mention of chemists), I found the geology-related topics most interesting. Perhaps they really were, or perhaps I just didn't know much about plate tectonics. To a reader with a more balanced background, though, I suspect evolutionary biology is more impressive, although it ties together nicely with geographic history in the final few chapters.

In retrospect, this book was a 500-page review article of science. It presented little peripheral history (or allowed the reader to provide context) and no methodology, but offered a flow of thought clearly enough. I think it would be valuable fodder to, say, an early undergraduate in the sciences - at the point where many of the names are familiar from a course here or there, but it's not yet easy to make the connections between them.

Two extensions would seem to follow: first, this text would make a killer interactive webpage. It's already arranged into text-box sized descriptions of the scientists. How about linking them all though a main timeline-type interface, leaving room for head shots and slick flash animations of "the size of a pea compared to the size of a basketball on the dot at the end of this sentence" riffs. If it's colorful enough, I'll bet the google ad link revenue would cover the endeavor. Second, a companion story of the first-level application of the scientific discoveries described, although easily equal in length and probably heavily biased toward warfare, medicine and plastics, would be entertaining if written similarly in style. Or, perhaps it has.

Training 2008-W07

As I recall, I ran W/F/Su. Let's just "Open all in tabs" to get motionbased, buckeyeoutdoors and my google calendar up at once, and maybe I can figure it out.

Some like to run in the hot, hot sun. On Wednesday, I ran in the mid-teens, streets and sidewalks; powder and ice. My goal was a 5-mile tempo run; I remembered the days when those two modifiers wouldn't have had a common antecedent. 5.5 miles in 49:52, but that included a minute or two of recovery after tripping and scraping my shin on a stop sign. Don't ask.

Friday saw treadmill intervals accompanied by the Sound Opinions interview with Anthony Bourdain. I was underwhelmed; then again, I'm not much for punk. Six 800m intervals at 8:00/mile, with a couple minutes of slow jog in-between. About 4.5 miles including warmup.

I did my weekend long, slow run at mid-day Sunday. 12.4 miles in just over 2 hours. My average heart rate was 162, probably helped (that is, kept low) by my careful negotiation of the semi-rain, semi-sleet.

I'll skip the my short runs next week (it's a recovery week anyway) to see if helps my consistent cough or residual shin soreness. My knees have been happy, though.

Card

I still can't believe the you hiked down to a beach, carrying pico-K in a most uncomfortable way.

Or that you relegate yourself to boring food so our genetic amalgam may avoid synthetic milk.

That's really cool.

Training 2008-W06

About 21 miles this week, featuring two indoor, knee-friendly jogs and a longer weekender.
M/T: Off
W: 12x400m at medium-fast (forgot my watch) pace with 90s rests in-between, about 7k total
R: Off
F: 6 miles, consisting of 1@10:30/ + 4@8:55/ + 1@10:30/
S: 11.2 miles around Heights (Shaker Lakes - campus - Cain Park)
S: Off

I did a better job keeping HR down on the long run, avg 156 versus 170+ last week, just by running really slowly. Bleh. Have to run slowly to run quickly, I suppose.

Funkenschlag

Actually, we have the English version of the title game, called Power Grid (but Funkenschlag is a much catchier post title).

Here's the idea: players compete for scarce cities (up to 3 players may occupy a city; any players network of cities must be contiguous), scarce power plants (there are always enough available, but some are better than others) and scarce resources (whose cost changes with availability: e.g. as coal becomes more popular, it also becomes more expensive). A player with a good combination of resources, cities and power plants can make more money, which is used to purchase more of all three in the next round. The only random facet of the game is order of power plants in the face-down stack, but everything else is open and nicely deterministic. [*]

I think a graphical representation of the mathematical model for this game would make nice art.

I thought a simple plot of the bankrolls of each of two players in a two-player contest would give some insight into the game's progress and eventual outcome, but it does not. I'll try again when we put together a 5-player contest.



[*] Except for the unpredictable economic choices of follow contestants: ahh, the bane of economists everywhere!

Training 2008-W05

Let's see: what to title this post...
I thought listing the week number for a training summary would be trivial, but alas, many options are available. I'll follow ISO8601, since I can, apparently, no where in my life escape standards. Furthermore, ISO says the week starts on a Monday, so whether my long run/bike lands on S or S, it fits nicely in the previous week.

That aside,

M/T: Just CFWU.
W: 3.5mi on the dreadmill - warmup, 4x[3:00@7:45/+3:00@10:15/], jog out
R: Off
F: 6mi treadmill - 2 warm, 3@8:45/, 1 out
S: Off. Oh, except for those squash matches to mush up my hamstrings.
S: 9.2mi@9:30/. A very nice, social run on icy trails. [Details]

18.7mi run this week; if all goes well, this will be the shortest week for a while.

Aggregate poll reporting

Why scoff at one political poll when you can scoff at them all? I wasn't familiar with pollster.com until seeing a link today at Cosmic Variance. I had no idea that Giuliani had such high name recognition poll ratings last year. Or maybe I did, and I ostriched.

Check out the polling history for GOP and the Dems.