Howdy, pilgrim! No ads — you're in the ^zhurnal (that's Russian for "journal") — see ZhurnalyWiki for a Wiki edition of individual items; see Zhurnal and Zhurnaly for quick clues as to what this is all about; see Random for a random page. Briefly, this is the diary of ^z = Mark Zimmermann ... previous volume = 0.96 ... complete list at bottom of page ... send comments & suggestions to "z (at) his (dot) com" ... click on a title link to go to that item in the ZhurnalyWiki where you can edit or comment on it ... RSS
"What's that sound?" Caren Jew asks as we approach the high trestle over Rock Creek. We hear something that resembles chirping. "Birds? Crickets? People?" Her last guess hits the target: there's an Avon Walk for Breast Cancer going through the neighborhood this Sunday morning, and from the Capital Crescent Trail we hear the cocktail-party-like chatter of hundreds of hikers streaming along Rock Creek Trail below. The noise reminds Caren of a scene in the film Sneakers — which leads Chatterbox Mark into disquisitions on the theme of impossible plot devices in movies including magic computer chips, time travel, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics in Source Code, etc., etc. Caren is amused. She's coming back after a bout of bronchitis so we go slowly and, when the walkers join the CCT on the other side of Connecticut Av, engage some of them in conversation.
In downtown Bethesda the river of anti-breast-cancer walkers leaves the CCT to flow toward DC. Caren and I turn back at the sign marking mile 4.5 and on a whim I try to show her the starting point of the Bethesda Trolley Trail, which I visited a month ago (cf. 2012-04-01 - Bethesda Trolley Trail Loop). But after going a few blocks north along Woodmont Av in search of Norfolk Av, I lose confidence in my memory and we turn back, leaving a silly stub on the GPS trackfile. Our conversation continues diverse, fun, and edgy-uninhibited, as I work on being less dainty in my vocabulary among friends. We talk about family, work, career, life-goals, etc. During the homeward trek Caren is startled when a couple of Avon walkers greet her by name. It turns out to be a cluster of old friends. After sweaty hugs we're back on track. We pass the spot at the golf course where we both got stung a couple of years ago (cf. 2009-08-22 - Two Bees, or Not Two Bees) and muse about beekeeping as a possible next-career pursuit.
- Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 04:42:38 (EDT)
At 6:45pm Robin and I arrive at College Park to find an event going on at the Uniersity of Maryland track. Plan B: we drive through campus and park behind Paint Branch Elementary School. At the flagpole in front we start down the connector path to Paint Branch Trail, first at a slow warmup jog. Robin alternates minutes of walking and running. I accelerate into a brisk ~8 min/mi trot around the Lake Artemesia loop, where flocks of walkers and cyclists and joggers are enjoying the warm evening. The iPhone GPS shows the route. Robin takes the bridge connector route to save ~1/3rd mile, and we meet for a cooldown walk/jog back to the car and then dinner at Marathon Deli.
- Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 04:37:11 (EDT)
Why does it bug me so much when, on the way into or out of the DC subway system, I'm stuck behind somebody who hesitates at the turnstile until it closes after the person ahead of them? They don't need to wait — they could save at least half a second if they just went ahead and scanned their fare card!
And yet I'm happy to pause for slow people to get off the elevator in front of me, and I cheerfully stop to give directions to befuddled tourists, etc., etc. Maybe it's the pointless inefficiency factor of the gate-waiters? Or the involuntary nature of the delay that they impose on me?
- Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 04:34:08 (EDT)
Midweek in downtown Rockville, after dropping daughter Gray off at music practice: time for supermaniac ^z to do a quick-change into running clothes. No phone booth, so the handicapped stall in the public library restroom suffices. Feed the meter to the max, an hour, and set off down the Pike. Today is Construction Day, with backhoes and shovelers and mountains of dirt and orange cones and closed sidewalks. At the corner of Veirs Mill Rd on a whim branch into the cemetery in search of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. After circling through the northern side of the graveyard finally spy their graves, and learn the author's full name, "Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald". The flat slab on the ground above their final resting place bears the final lines of The Great Gatsby:
| So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. |
Then make haste before the parking meter runs out: Veirs Mill eastward to the Millennium Trail, north to Gude Dr, total a bit farther than planned. Pushing hard gets back with 4 minutes to spare on the ticking time bomb. Whew! The GPS trackfile says pace goes 10:16 ⇒ 8:53 ⇒ 9:23 ⇒ 9:26 ⇒ 9:27 ⇒ 9:01 for the final fraction.
- Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at 04:52:36 (EDT)
In "GTD Times", the official web site associated with David Allen's Getting Things Done time-management/productivity system, late last year a staffer posted an excellent summary of how to make GTD as simple as possible:
(cf. Mind Like Water (2011-12-24), ...)
- Monday, May 14, 2012 at 07:40:12 (EDT)
"It's all about the trackfile!" I remind Robin and Caren Jew this afternoon as we circumnavigate Lake Needwood, sticking to trails rather than following the road along the eastern side. Caren is recovering from strep throat and bronchitis, so we take our time, walk the hills, and avoid tripping on roots. Poison ivy clings to trees and looms close to the narrow path. Two big geese honk at us. A rusty-cranked pedal boat squeaks along the water. This is the first weekend that kayaks, canoes, etc. are available for rent, according to the County park service. At the boathouse we see that pedal boats go for $6 per half hour; canoes, rowboats, and kayaks are $8/hour. The iPhone GPS trackfile says we cover 2.67 miles; Robin's different app agrees within a percent or two.
- Sunday, May 13, 2012 at 05:42:39 (EDT)
From notes I took in a pre-retirement class, October 2010 (see Retirement Tips - 1, Retirement Tips - 2, and Retirement Tips - 3 for other suggestions and observations):
- Saturday, May 12, 2012 at 05:46:47 (EDT)
Another comparison test between Garmin and iPhone gives 3.58 miles vs. 3.63 miles respectively, well within expected errors. Mary Ewell, like Caren Jew, has The Eye for wildlife: she spies rabbits and a groundhog. Other pedestrians point out a woodchuck in a tree, apparently feasting on berries. Mary hasn't run for weeks so today is a comeback. After I visit with comrade Eugene Miya of NASA/Ames and drop him off at Dulles Airport for his flight back to the San Francisco area, I go to Mary's home. We talk about family, and then she drives us to the W&OD trail where we walk 10 minutes to warm up, run 10 minutes, then alternate 5 minutes running and running.
- Friday, May 11, 2012 at 04:37:52 (EDT)
In 2006 Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of several extraordinary books on mindfulness (Wherever You Go, There You Are, Full Catastrophe Living, ...), gave a lecture at MIT that's available on video via iTunes U ("The Ceaseless Society: Is 24/7 Good for Us?") and on the WGBH Forum Network. Kabat-Zinn talks about attention, duality, science, suffering, and the interrelationships between doing, thinking, being, and awareness. His style is gentle and his words are engaging. There are MIT techno in-jokes, musings about his years as a grad student, and thoughts on how mindfulness has helped people in the final stages of their lives. Some snippets, slightly edited for continuity, follow ...
... on the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic:
... We work a lot with medical patients who have tremendous suffering. Our track record with the dead is not so good. So one of the sort of cardinal rules of thumb [...] on the people who come to our stress reduction clinic [is] that no matter what's wrong with you and no matter what the doctor sent you for, no matter whether it's prostate cancer, breast cancer, heart disease of one kind or another, back pain — as long as you're breathing, no matter what's wrong with you, from our perspective there's more right with you than wrong with you. OK? ...
... on being in the present:
... "I wish I knew this when I was a young person." It doesn't matter. Now is the only time that we're alive. So now is a good time. And the rest is all thinking. ...
... on Buddhism without Buddhism:
... This approach that we developed 27 years ago now at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center involves training regular people like you and me in Buddhist meditative practices without the Buddhism. Or, you could say, with the absolute heart of Buddhism, because Buddhism is about non-duality. So in a sense, if you make yourself into a Buddhist in your mind, [...] if you think you're a Buddhist, in a sense you're not a Buddhist.
If this is beginning to sound a little bit like Zen, that's why Zen sounds that way. They're trying to point to something that the intellectual capacity that we have can't figure out because it's jumping through another dimensionality ...
... on mindfulness meditation:
... It's about paying attention. Meditation, my working definition of it, to boil it down, [...] it's about paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally. And that's called mindfulness, paying attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgmentally. Ultimately, it stops being on purpose. ...
... on creativity:
... Creativity is mysterious, but one way to generate or tilt the probability of creativity is to cultivate more spaciousness in the mind, because thought tends to sort of contract and then get [...] stymied, when it can't get to the next thought.
And sometimes, if you learn how to just stand there, at what the Zen people in the Zen archery world call the point of highest tension — nobody could string or hold back Odysseus's bow except Odysseus, nobody — but when you can stand at the point of highest tension with your thoughts going nowhere and hold it in something bigger, wakefully, not necessarily in a dream, but actually wakefully, interesting connections seem to appear because they're already here.
But we are in some sense blind to them because our thinking itself acts like lenses and prevents us from seeing orthogonal opportunities, opportunities that are rotated in some way in relationship to the passive assumptions, to what's already known.
And what science is about is going between what's already known and the next that's going to be known — but how it is going to happen, and part of that is just an incredibly beautiful adventure. ...
- Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 04:55:27 (EDT)
"Great shirt!" I compliment the young Asian guy I meet running along Second Avenue near downtown Silver Spring. By chance we're both wearing exactly the same outfit, an olive-hued Bull Run Run 50 miler finisher's top. Robins hop across the sidewalk. Roses bloom in profusion. Fuel along the way is a single root beer barrel. Breakfast beforehand was a Snickers candy bar and a cup of coffee. A lady on a park bench near Rhode Island Avenue smiles. Noisy cement mixer trucks cruise along Fort Totten Road. The Capitol dome gleams in the distance. The Catholic University law school building inspires, as always, with words of wisdom inscribed along the top of its façade.
The new iPhone 4 has a built-in GPS and so using the free MapMyRun app I set off at 0645 on a cool Saturday morning to compare it with the Garmin 205 wrist GPS unit. The results are quite close: iPhone says 11.23 miles and Garmin estimates 11.17, about 0.5% less. I divert to refill a water bottle at the only fountains seen en route, a community park in the Takoma neighborhood near the Metropolitan Branch Trail. Traffic causes long pauses at a few street crossings such as North Capital. The fishhook at the end of the run is to add a little mileage and avoid red lights. Pace accelerates in the final five miles. Splits by the wrist unit are 10:38 ⇒ 10:07 ⇒ 9:27 ⇒ 9:39 ⇒ 10:04 ⇒ 10:21 ⇒ 9:06 ⇒ 9:48 ⇒ 8:45 ⇒ 8:44 ⇒ 8:53.
- Wednesday, May 09, 2012 at 04:35:29 (EDT)
The fortune cookie that comes with my egg fu yung on Sunday offers a thoughtful proverb:
| The value of a cup is in its emptiness. |
(cf. No Method (2010-01-21), Shul (2011-06-11), Zen Soup (2012-02-09), ...)
- Tuesday, May 08, 2012 at 04:50:29 (EDT)
I miss the MCRRC Firebirds Mile track meet tonight (parental taxi duty), so instead after a warmup lap test my legs at the University of Maryland track. The result, after an initial 1:37 too-fast 400m, isn't pretty: 1:43 + 1:46 + 1:48 with that final split including the extra ~9 meters to make a full mile. Total = 6:54. Robin does a 100m sprint in a hair over 14 seconds.
- Tuesday, May 08, 2012 at 04:48:02 (EDT)
At Ken-Gar I arrive about 8am. Ken Swab is there a few minutes earlier, Rebecca Rosenberg and Barry Smith a bit later. We trot from milepost 7 to 10 and back (cf. GPS trackfile) with splits 11:17 ⇒ 11:01 ⇒ 11:20 ⇒ 10:55 ⇒ 10:49 ⇒ 10:29. I sprint ahead at the end to get my average pace down a hair below 11 min/mi; the watch reads 1:05:59 when I stop it. Rebecca and Emaad have the Big Sur Marathon next Sunday.
- Monday, May 07, 2012 at 04:39:27 (EDT)
A couple of months ago The Economist in an article "The French Elite: Old School Ties" commented about graduates of the prestigious university École Nationale d'Administration (ENA): "So-called énarques, who tend to be fiercely clever and answer questions with the phrase 'There are three points,' shrug off accusations of elitism."
Responding to any question with "There are three points" is, of course, quite proper:
So (with a bit of recursion) three points suffice!
(cf. TufteThoughts (2000-12-18) esp. Edward Tufte's threefold rules for giving a good presentation, ...)
- Sunday, May 06, 2012 at 13:30:28 (EDT)
 | GPS trackfile elevation errors and a suppressed-zero graph exaggerate the terrain relief along the "Brookeville Capital for a Day" 5k MCRRC race course. But when running it, the hills are definitely noticeable, especially the huge downhill near the start that I blasted at ~6.5 min/mi, and the long climbs during mile 3 that pushed that pace toward 8 min/mi. |
| The GPS concurs with the course mile markers and says my splits are 7:00 + 7:08 + 7:40 and then a final ~0.11 mile at 7:08 pace for the overall estimated 7:15 min/mi. Not quite as good as the 2011-05-07 - Brookeville 5k Race result of 22:19 but I'm older, if not wiser, now ... (photo by Jim Rich) |  |
- Saturday, May 05, 2012 at 06:09:32 (EDT)
A thoughtful essay (link thanks to Robin) by "celandine13" on LiveJournal is titled "Errors vs. Bugs and the End of Stupidity". The author begins with her piano master teacher Phil Cohn's clever comment: "A pianist has to be kind of schizophrenic. You have to believe in telekinesis. You have to believe you have the power to move your fingers with your mind." She argues that when you make a mistake at the piano, or elsewhere in life, the best explanation is not that you're a lazy bum of a person or simply bad at the task. And perhaps just practicing harder to get your random error rate down isn't quite the right approach.
Instead, celandine13 contends, a far more productive model is that mistakes are semi-deterministic bugs like those that appear in computer programs, not uncontrollable stochastic errors that come and go. Then a problem doesn't happen because a person is stupid or sloppy or otherwise un-good, but for a specific diagnosable reason, a flaw that can be identified and fixed. Piano teacher Cohn, for instance, approached mistakes deliberately and non-judgmentally. As celandine13 says, "pretending you can move your fingers with your mind is a kind of mindfulness meditation that can make it easier to unlearn the calcified patterns of movement that cause mistakes." Likewise, she suggests, in teaching learning-disabled students:
Maybe nobody's actually stupid. Maybe the distinction between "He's got a learning disability" and "He's just lousy at math" is a false one. Maybe everybody should think of themselves as having learning disabilities, in the sense that our areas of weakness need to be acknowledged, investigated, paid special attention, and debugged.
Sounds a lot like Jon Kabat-Zinn's description: "Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non judgmentally." Or Ayya Khema's mantra, "Awareness, No Blame, Change", or Adrianna Weisman and Jean Smith's "No Self-Blaming" exhortations. Or Joshua Foer's comments on efficient practice as developing and testing hypotheses about one's failures. Or in a sillier vein the Homer Simpson advice, "You can't keep blaming yourself. Just blame yourself once, and move on."
- Friday, May 04, 2012 at 06:20:24 (EDT)
220-yard repeats (halfway around lane #2 of a 400m track) on a Monday evening descend steadily in pace: 52 ⇒ 48 ⇒ 47 ⇒ 46 ⇒ 46 ⇒ 45 ⇒ 45 ⇒ 45 ⇒ 45 ⇒ 44 seconds. Robin is slower, and I wait 5-10 s for him at the end of each so we can walk together the half lap back to the starting line. But on the final interval despite my best effort he sprints ahead and finishes ~1 s in front, while running in lane #5 and thus going ~10m farther than me — bravo!
(cf. GPS trackfile, ...)
- Thursday, May 03, 2012 at 04:44:34 (EDT)
Job-hunting strategies, from notes I took in a pre-retirement class, October 2010 (see Retirement Tips - 1 and Retirement Tips - 2 for earlier installments):
- Wednesday, May 02, 2012 at 14:06:32 (EDT)
"I don't see the attraction of running more than 50k," Rebecca Rosenberg says, an hour or so into our run along Rock Creek Trail.
I laugh and ask, "Do you know how that sentence sounds to a normal person?"
Earlier this morning I'm late leaving home for the rendezvous. I phone Rebecca, who tells me that she and Emaad Burki and Barry Smith are about to start at Ken-Gar, RCT milepost 7 heading north. At Milepost 8 when I park the car they're nowhere to be seen. I walk about, phone, get no answer, try again, and eventually learn that the gang ran faster than anticipated and have already passed by. Forget about milepost 9! I head to the big soccer fields on Veirs Mill Rd near Aspen HIll Rd and start running south at milepost 10. A few steps later they materialize.
Much good conversation ensues as we return together to Ken-Gar where Barry, who last weekend ran two marathons, stops. Rebecca and Emaad and I continue downstream to milepost 5 and then return finally to milepost 7 at Ken-Gar again. Rebecca's offer of a ride back to my car is tempting but I resist. The solo run to milepost 10 where I began is brisk. Splits by my GPS: 10:54 ⇒ 11:54 ⇒ 10:52 ⇒ 13:25 ⇒ 11:00 ⇒ 11:02 ⇒ 11:12 ⇒ 9:00 ⇒ 9:05 ⇒ 8:42 — whew!
- Tuesday, May 01, 2012 at 04:42:51 (EDT)
On an iPhone's small screen the zhurnaly.com main pages, the ^zhurnaly archive pages, and many ZhurnalyWiki pages are hard to read and/or unæesthetic. The architect of the Oddmuse Wiki, Alex Schröder, has a blog which sometimes comments on mobile device issues, and that recently led me to think about how to improve the zhurnaly.com Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) which advises browsers how to render a wiki page. The Oddmuse CSS discussion was extremely helpful. Changes to http://zhurnaly.css were guided by three principles:
Key modifications of http://zhurnaly.css were focused on making the font used on most pages a reasonable size on the mobile device screen, keeping embedded quotation blocks readable, and handling tables more gracefully. A CSS file can detect an iPhone browser by the logic "@media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)". In words, the zhurnaly.com CSS now asks an iPhone to:
That iPhone-specific section of the CSS thus looks like:
@media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) {
body { font-size: 300%; }
table.user { font-size: small; }
span.gotobar { font-size: small; }
div.footer { font-size: small; }
}The only other change to the Zhurnaly CSS, which applies to all browsers (not just iPhone's Safari) was to tell browsers to make the font used in quotation blocks relatively "smaller" than normal, rather than the absolute "small" size: "blockquote { font-size: smaller; }". These changes seem to improve the presentation of >80% of ^zhurnaly pages. Bug reports and suggestions for further improvements are welcome. So are comments on how other small-screen devices render pages. Thank you!
- Monday, April 30, 2012 at 04:46:32 (EDT)
Is an I the same as a mind? Or mind + body? Or mind + body + surroundings? Where to draw a line?
Is a mind the same as a brain? Or brain + patterns of nerve impulses in the brain? Or brain + nerve impulses + other context? What happens when unconscious, dreaming, ...?
If an I observes its "own" mind's thoughts, is that observer-watcher the same I? Or a higher-level I?
Is an I necessary for "free will"? "Emotions"?
What are other questions to ask about an I?
(cf. MeanMeaners (1999-07-03), TheMysterians (1999-08-02), BitsOfConsciousness (2000-01-21), AlteredStates (2000-02-03), ColdHardMind (2000-02-09), ThoughtfulMetaphors (2000-11-08), UpheavalsOfThoughtRevisited (2002-12-13), DreamData (2003-03-22), StrangeLoops (2007-10-06), Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (2008-06-15), Buddhism Without Beliefs (2008-09-19), Unselfing (2009-01-14), Einstein on Self (2010-01-31), Valorization of Mind over matter (2010-05-06), The Watcher (2010-11-15), ...)
- Saturday, April 28, 2012 at 05:17:26 (EDT)
 | My legs feel heavy after the 2012-04-14 - MCRRC Spin in the Woods 8k XC but although Barry Smith says his are likewise, he still wants some more mileage. So homeward across the Potomac we go to Carderock, for an out-and-back along the C&O Canal towpath. We branch after a mile onto a side path but it just leads to a parking lot, where a couple of deer wait for us to leave so they can cross. Erosion repairs block the course farther along and divert us up stairs to the Great Falls trail. We stop at about the half-hour point, Barry photographs the river below, and we jog back to his car. |
(cf. GPS trackfile, ...)
- Friday, April 27, 2012 at 04:40:54 (EDT)
In Fully Present, a book by Susan Smalley and Diana Winston on mindfulness and meditation, part of Chapter 6 ("Feeling Bad: Dealing with Negative Emotions") muses on background and balance:
When we are not reacting emotionally, we are in a different physiological state of balance. We all know that balanced feeling—not high or low, not fear or joy, not anger or love, but simply nonreactive. Recognizing your bodily and mental experience in this state of not reacting emotionally is like recognizing the space between words printed on this page, or the background elements of a Picasso painting, or the space within a Frank Lloyd Wright building that makes it an architectural masterpiece.
Mindfulness is a tool for improving your discernment of emotional states (and the bodily changes that accompany them) when they arise. You can become a Sherlock Holmes of your feeling and their associated physiological changes. Through investigation, you can detect them earlier and with finer resolution. Lao-Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, "Deal with a thing while it is still nothing." We all remember times when we could have stopped a situation from evolving into a big mess by catching ourselves—whatever it was we said or did—before the situation escalated. Catching your emotional reactions early, when they are still small, is a way to alter your actions to keep them from fueling difficult situations. Think of a time when you reacted emotionally and that led to big problems; later you probably saw how easy it would have been to just say or do nothing (just "act like a log"). When you pause between emotion and action, your words and actions are less likely to hurt yourself or others because you're able to circumvent or at least lessen your emotional reaction. And because we are only aware of the tip of the iceberg of emotional responses (a huge number of emotional reactions occur unconsciously), the process of discovery is likely to be never-ending. There is always an emotional reaction we are likely to miss.
Or, as good advice that someone like me especially needs to remember: pause before sticking a foot into it!
(cf. Rebalancing Doing and Being (2011-02-28), Breath and Awareness (2011-03-12), Come SAIL Away (2011-11-26), Equanimity (2012-02-01), ...)
- Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 05:01:26 (EDT)
 | The GPS trackfile says a bit less than the official distance, but machts nichts as my German grandma would say. It's a lovely day for an intense run up and down the hills of Scotts Run Park in northern Virginia. Barry Smith kindly gives me a ride to the event. Before the start Catherine Howard introduces herself; she's a friend of Mary Ewell and a fast runner whose half-marathon PR is near 1:45. I start with Michelle Price in the middle of the pack. The double-loop loop course is slightly changed from past years (2007-04-07 - Difficult Run, Difficult Run 8k XC 2008, 2009-04-11 - Difficult Run XC) and replaces the super-steep initial hill with a series of lesser slopes that add up to the same elevation gain but reduce the single-track traffic jam somewhat. Nevertheless we're in a forced slow walk near the start until we get to wider spot. Crawling under a fallen tree trunk I scrape my back as Warren Prunella wisely goes around and photographer Dan Reichmann captures the moment. The second lap I stay lower and survive. Other deadfalls are low enough to leap over or step on top of. GPS errors are fierce today; Barry's unit says 4.6 miles, and a couple of other finishers report 4.8 or so. Pushing hard on the final lap I pass a 10-year-old in the final mile. "Good run, Sir!" I pant. After the finish stinging flies keep us moving. Arch-rival Tom Young finishes 5 full minutes ahead of me. Catherine Howard is first woman and comes in more than a minute in front of Tom. I pass Alex and Adam Dutchak during the long climb in lap 2 and fist-bump congratulate them after their finish. Ten-year-old Kyle Morin is a fast runner whom I only manage to sneak past during the final mile. |
The official result:
50 41/69 3/6 189 Mark Zimmermann M 59 Kensington MD MCRRC 45:07 9:05
That is, 50th overall place, 41st of 69 men, 3rd of 6 in the male 55-59 age cohort, 45:07 total time.
- Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 04:34:25 (EDT)
StatPorn: that's a one-word summary of A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire, a 2011 book by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam that I found on the new book shelf at the local library recently. It purports to be a statistical analysis of some huge data sets on Internet use of pornography, mega-samples of information extracted from search engines, surveys and usage logs. But there's no real discussion of self-selection, sampling errors, or bias, e.g., of the likely differences between people in general and the subset who dominate online porn-consumption.
Instead, the authors provide detailed examples and extensive, explicit quotations from a broad spectrum of erotica, along with annotated tabulations of popular search terms and pop-psychological "explanations", overgeneralized just-so stories that aren't justified in spite of the profuse notes and citations that occupy pages 247-383 of the hardback. It's rather reminiscent of the 1967 book The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, a long-ago best-seller that similarly "explained" large swaths of human behavior based on loose evolutionary/socio-biological arguments. Both traded away rigor and nuance in exchange for drama and (the hope of) big book sales. Lead author Ogas is currently characterized in Wikipedia as "... a cognitive neuroscientist, science book author, and game show contestant". Hmmmmm ....
- Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 04:50:43 (EDT)
Four brisk evening miles in lane 2 of the University of Maryland track — 7:44 + 7:43 + 7:44 + 7:35 — while on the field nearby students practice discus, javelin, and shot put. Robin runs a 5k to test his pace.
- Monday, April 23, 2012 at 04:38:11 (EDT)
More highlights from notes I took in a pre-retirement class, October 2010 (see Retirement Tips - 1 for Part 1):
- Sunday, April 22, 2012 at 05:56:01 (EDT)
Wild west winds gust to 30 mph during evening laps at the University of Maryland track, with 800m repeats descending in a pretty pattern 3:54 > 3:49 > 3:40 > 3:39 > 3:38. See GPS trackfile for a boring map.
- Saturday, April 21, 2012 at 06:58:25 (EDT)
Walking to the Metro the other day, thinking about a problem, I caught myself saying, "What else?" to myself. Maybe it's a useful get-out-of-the-box method:
And so forth. What else should be on the list?
- Friday, April 20, 2012 at 04:35:14 (EDT)
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