I liked this reflection on training and racing from pro bicycle racer Neil Bezdek, and especially appreciated this sentence: “I train a lot because it’s fun, and racing professionally gives me an excuse to do so.”
My friend Cara recently encouraged some people, including me, to post quantifiable personal goals for this year. Here are a subset of mine:
Fitness
Run at least 500 miles and bicycle at least 2500 miles.
Finish a half-marathon in under 2:00.
Finish the Centurion 50 in under 2:15.
Enter and finish an Olympic-distance triathlon.
Enter and finish at least two cyclocross races.
Lose at least 20 pounds.
Creative
Capture, process, and post to flickr at least one good photograph per week.
Compose, record, and produce at least ten songs in any genre or texture.
Complete at least two currently in-flight carpentry or woodworking projects.
Read seven good books not related to fitness, photography, or computing; at least two must be fiction.
Professional
Submit at least one paper to a good conference or journal.
I’ll be tracking these activities on RunKeeper (mostly restricted to my “street team”), flickr, and audio.willbenton.com; I’ll summarize occasionally with posts here that are tagged “2012-goals“
I recently plotted some of my local road bike rides from last season using TileMill, the TIGER map data from the US Census Bureau, and exported activity routes from RunKeeper. I had a pretty good sense of what ride I do the most often (a fairly flat 18-20 mile out-and-back that I can complete in under an hour unless car traffic is awful — great for time-constrained rides and intervals), but I was interested to see where else I’ve gone. The results turned out pretty well, so I’m posting them here. I only plotted road rides in Dane County, only rides on a geared bike (i.e., no commutes), and I chose only a subset of all my rides. The paths are lighter or darker proportionally to how frequently I traveled them.
The figure above is a close-up of the section of the map including the UW Arboretum and the Capital City Trail. This was by far my most common ride in 2010, but I did it much less frequently in 2011. (In fact, I think I rode this route more frequently on my fixed-gear than on my road bike in 2011.)
This is a detail of some of my favorite short hill-climbing loops near Paoli, WI. The loop to the lower left is more challenging (and more rewarding) but I didn’t do it as often. To the upper left is the beginning of a fast and fun route to Mt. Horeb, WI that also serves as the beginning of the WI Ironman cycling loop. I’m hoping both of these will be substantially darker at the end of next summer!
Finally, here’s the whole map, cropped to include Madison (for context) and the parts of western Dane County that I actually rode in.
I did these manually, so the obvious next step is to write up a little program to generate these automatically. I’d also like to have a more interesting visualization (like making paths thicker instead of darker or perhaps incorporating elevation and average speed data somehow). Overall, though, I’m pleased with these results. I was quite impressed with how easy TileMill was to use, and am optimistic that this toolchain, combined with some additional cleverness and care, could produce a really compelling presentation of these data.
John Carmack shares some thoughts on static program analysis for finding defects. The whole article is a good read, but I especially appreciated his tongue-in-cheek interpretation of Microsoft’s pricing model for their analysis tools (free in the Xbox developer kit, but very expensive in the Windows developer kit): “I read into this that Microsoft feels that game quality on the [Xbox] 360 impacts them more than application quality on Windows does.”
Also, see this related and hilarious photo, especially if we went to grad school together. (Photo link via Pascal Cuoq.)
Happy birthday, sweetheart! Dad loves you. It was an exciting Christmas Day when we got to meet you1, and you’ve sure kept it interesting since. You were so excited about your second birthday (we’d ask you whose birthday we were going to celebrate on Sunday and you’d gleefully shout “The baby Jesus! and Maggie!”), and we had a lot of fun celebrating with you. Here are some of my favorite memories of you from the last year:
[D]elivery devices are more tangible “things” than the books they hold. No wonder we obsess about them, since the things we used to call things are suddenly files, endlessly electronically vanishing.
I enjoyed this thoughtful piece by pianist Jeremy Denk on how attachment to “content delivery devices” is replacing attachment to “content,” and I wonder: is this phenomenon also related to the reality that we simply have fewer “things” to hold dear if all of our records, books, photographs, and letters are streams of bits? Does the ever-increasing probability that some future device won’t be able to read our movies or digital negatives, or that we could lose an entire library if Amazon goes out of business, encourage us to embrace the impermanence of all things?
Often, the places we remember fondly don’t exist in any meaningful sense after we leave. This probably holds most true with institutions like colleges, but even a city or region can change so dramatically in a short time as to be nearly unrecognizable to expats. That’s why I was relieved to see that bloated grocery unions are still ruining retail for everyone in the DC suburbs, just as they were when I went to junior high and high school in the area. In one small way, it’s like I never left.
Eight hundred years ago this was beaten by writing 11-11-1111, on Nov. 11, 1111, but it is not likely that the precise monkish scribes at that time would have allowed so slovenly a method of recording an essential fact. As none of us is likely to be living in the year 11111, it would be well for those who delight in curious trifles to take their fill of enjoyment out of this method of dating to-day, 11-11-11.
Andrea once told me of one of our friends from college who was, like her, an English major, and who protested loudly when they studied some William Carlos Williams poem1: “Why are we reading this? I could have written it!” The instructor replied that, yes, perhaps he could have, but he didn’t.
I have (and really like) a first-generation Luma Loop camera strap, and I understand that the recent revision is a dramatic improvement. So I found the news that Luma Labs has discontinued their whole product line in response to patent pressure rather disheartening. Duncan’s letter necessarily only provides his side of the story; furthermore, it doesn’t link to the patent in question so that his readers could evaluate his claims (most notably, that the patent application hinges upon the quite-old idea of a strap with a sliding camera mount).
Nerds who get exercised about software patents often point to particularly egregious cases in which patents are granted for obvious and non-novel techniques. Personally, I have often charitably assumed that these cases are explained by the limited domain knowledge of patent examiners; an obvious technique, when presented in a sufficiently vague and obfuscated manner, may appear novel to someone who understands the basic concepts of a field but doesn’t practice it. If the story as Duncan tells it is essentially true, though, the camera-strap patent is far harder to explain.
UPDATE: I can’t find the patent Duncan describes (which he says was filed in 2007 and granted on November 1, 2011), but I did find this patent, which would also seem to encumber any invention that resembles the Luma Loop.
Via Alan Jacobs, a megachurch sends cease-and-desist letters to other churches that have the same name, with predictably tragicomic results:
When cases like this arise in the business world, it’s customary for a law office to send a notice asking the other organization to adjust their branding to differentiate it. This is commonly referred to as a cease and desist letter. On September 27, 2011, our legal counsel sent such a letter to these three Mars Hill churches requesting that they change their logo and name. In hindsight, we realize now that the way we went about raising our concerns, while acceptable in the business world, is not the way we should deal with fellow Christians.
Jacobs points out that this response reveals something pretty terrible about “the state of contemporary megachurch Christianity,” and I agree. But beyond the total impropriety of Mars Hill’s response, the thing that strikes me most is that the legal claim is surely indefensible: Mars Hill is not a particularly novel name for a church. Can you imagine any of the following scenarios leading to legal remedies?
“Dear Sir, We are the intellectual property counsel for First Baptist Church of Lake City. It has come to our attention that your church is also named ‘First Baptist,’ which creates confusion in the ecclesiastical marketplace and uses our famous name and trademark to attract parishioners who mistakenly believe they are receiving our services….”
“Dear Sir, Our firm represents Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church of Rockwell City. We understand that your parish enterprise has been operating using the names of St. Peter and/or St. Paul without our express authorization. This damages our brand, since worshippers have come to expect a particular experience only available from our parish enterprise, which is widely known as a halo atop the golden buckle on the corn belt, and its licensed affiliates….”
“Dear Sir, We serve as counsel for Trinity Lutheran Church of Webster City, the owner and/or exclusive licensee of the ‘Trinity Lutheran’ mark as applied to places of worship (cf. Flacius v. Karlstadt), schools, and buffet restaurants, among many other uses. Your organization’s use of the ‘Trinity Lutheran’ name and a logo that uses serifed type much as ours does is in violation of multiple civil laws governing trademark infringement….”
I can’t, either.
This list of logos from defunct department stores has some beautiful and diverse examples of a generally-lost art. In addition, if you happen to assume that Macy’s has absorbed almost every regional department store in the United States in the last four decades, the brief captions will do little to convince you otherwise. This is a shame, since even an mediocre lettering job is superior to just about anything set in Avant Garde.
I saw this link from Swobo’s Twitter feed. GM briefly ran an ad earlier today in which they encouraged college students to “stop pedaling [and] start driving” by participating in some discount program that would presumably make it easier for them to buy a new car:
(Image credit: BikePortland.org)
I find this concept and its execution ill-advised and gauche but am unable to muster righteous outrage about an ad campaign that makes fun of cyclists; surely, a car company needs to portray their product as preferable to alternate modes of transportation, or else they’d be making bikes (or city buses, sedan chairs, spaceships, tuk-tuks, etc.). But I did chuckle over the following two points:
Apparently, we’re encouraging college students to take out new-car loans now. I guess most students will have paid for the car before they’ve finished paying for their liberal arts degrees (the Chevrolet Sonic featured in the ad is roughly equivalent to a semester at a private college circa 2011), and you can occasionally resell a car for some fraction of what you paid for it, while your BA in music history1 or whatever is less likely to provide any tangible return. Still, it seems callous to prey on people who, by virtue of their status as customers of higher education, have such an obvious predisposition for making bad financial decisions.
I own three bicycles. Each was made by a different company with different characteristics: small companies and large companies, companies that source other manufacturers’ components and companies that design their own components. However, they all have something in common: none of these manufacturers has needed a massive infusion of government cash to stay in business at any point.
1 I say this with particular authority, since I graduated college approximately three credit-hours short of a BA in music history.
Read this description of a literally incredible new Photoshop feature and then review this classic tirade. (I’m sure that the Photoshop feature actually can produce usable results for a large class of images; it is, after all, possible to do many things that are impossible in the general case perfectly adequately most of the time.)
A nice explanation of the difference between open source and so-called “Open Core” licensing: “What is most important to understand about an Open Core project is that it has nothing to do with an open source project. If you are depending on a single closed source component then you have to regard the whole project as a closed source project as you lose all the benefits of open source.”
If you need any further evidence that internet commenters are, in the aggregate, philistines, note that this video has received thumbs down from 60% of YouTube voters:
(See also “Scarlatti eruption,” a post about Enrico Baiano’s excellent interpretations.)
I hope this semester of college (your first? or is it your third?) is treating you well. I feel like I’ve known you for a long time, even though we’ve never met. You see, when you’ve told people to email you, you’ve given them my gmail.com address. It’s been great to watch you grow up over the last few years.
I agree with the diagnoses but not necessarily the prescriptions of this thought-provoking piece by Megan McArdle. The central idea is that the way we develop (not merely the way we use) new antibiotic drugs accelerates the emergence of drug-resistant infections: “Antibiotics are an exhaustible resource. We should be treating them like an oil field, or an endangered species. Instead, we handle them like consumer electronics.”
This Nissan Leaf commercial, in which the narrator asks us to imagine a world in which “gas powers everything,” is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen. A world in which “gas powers everything” would not have tiny internal-combustion engines attached to every appliance and gadget. Instead, it would look roughly like our world, in which batteries and alternating current both exist even though we primarily get the energy to power devices by burning smoke-belching coal. But perhaps acknowledging where our electricity comes from is beyond the consideration of Nissan’s target market; the fellow smugly unplugging his Leaf at the end of the ad appears to believe that his wall socket merely channels the power of unicorns and the optimism of children’s dreams.
I follow Twitter users representing a wide range of vocations, political philosophies, and creeds, but they all have one thing in common: visceral hatred of mediocre rock band Nickelback. I base this assertion on the sheer number of people who’ve approvingly retweeted the following message:
WARNING: if you see posts offering free clip of the new Nickelback album DO NOT CLICK. It links to a free clip of the new Nickelback album.
The variety of people gleefully expressing Nickelback-related animus actually gives me great hope for a harmonious future. Nickelback’s universally hated oeuvre may have the potential to help people of diverse concerns find common ground — and, ultimately, to bring the world together in peace. In this sense, they are the inverse of fictional rock band Wyld Stallyns, whose music was so widely loved that it led to the eventual establishment of a 27th-Century utopia.
Be excellent to each another, my Nickelback-hating internet friends.
Some prankster made a fake Google+ page for Paul Krugman, on which he posted “…we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the [Mineral, VA] earthquake had done more damage.” Since this is not even the most ridiculous thing that Krugman has said in the last fortnight, many reasonable people assumed it was authentic, although it was a little too on-the-nose to not arouse any skepticism. The prankster then confessed, while pointing out that the “we need a bigger earthquake” sentiment essentially follows from the actual Krugman’s public statements about disasters and spending.
