Runner's World Complete Guide To Trail Running

A good common sense book on trail running.

I've fallen a few times while trail running. I've worried about that. Am I too clumsy for trailing running? The book says… "It's okay to fall. I fall a lot-- it's not that big a deal" … "don't think your goal should be to run stumble-free. A more realistic goal is to feel comfortable running and handling tricky situations."

The book points you to cycling gloves to protect your hands against falls.

I often have to walk up steep hills. The book says the following on running up hills… "Don't put so much pressure on yourself to run the same pace as on even ground. It's difficult to maintain. Impossible to maintain is more like it."

"Everyone will tell you it's smart to walk uphill… It's more energy efficient even if you're just on a run of 6 to 8 miles. It's better to slow to a walk than to waste energy."

"If your breath becomes so labored and your heart rate so fast that you slow down dramatically, save your energy and walk. Once you catch your breath, pick up your jogging pace again."

Assholes-- a theory.

By Aaron James.

A lot of deep thinking about assholes, who they are, their effect on the world, and how to deal with them.

1. Don't try to change the asshole
2. Stoically accept the asshole.
3. Engage the asshole on your terms.
4. Strengthen your ties with non assholes.

LED Lights Are Ruining Laundry Detergent's White-Brightening Trick

LED lighting is great. The right bulb gives the same warm incandescent glow you love from a fraction of the energy. But there's a downside: while LEDs make cities look awesome, the most common type of LED lighting dims the ultraviolet trick laundr...

Gizmodo - Saturday, April 19, 2014

If you have Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8, you can read the full article at:

bingnews://application/view?entitytype=article&pageId=0&contentId=274928407&market=EN-US&referrer=share

Sent from my Windows Phone

The Sober Truth

Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-step Programs and the Rehab Industry by Lance M. Dodes.

Don't fool yourself. You are the easiest person for you to fool.

How does that contrast with knowing yourself?

If you find something that works for you, or gives you hope, but don't test it well, then how do you know that you haven't fooled yourself?

People love stories that give them hope. They love to solve problems with other people who face the same challenges.

Add to this that Alcoholics Anonymous and Rehab retreats are not incented to measure their success rates, just tell there success stories. The result is an industry that offers a lot of hope, but doesn't really know how well it's doing.

Addiction is very complicated. Many addicts hop between addictions. Get them off of alcohol and they switch to gambling, or sex, or drugs. Treating substance abuse is only the start of treating an addiction.  

Description of spacetime and the spead of light, cribbed from the web in answer to the question "Why does light travel at the speed of light?"

Everything, by nature of simply existing, is "moving" at the speed of light (which really has nothing to do with light: more on that later). Yes, that does include you.
Our understanding of the universe is that the way that we perceive space and time as separate things is, to be frank, wrong. They aren't separate: the universe is made of "spacetime," all one word. A year and a lightyear describe different things in our day to day lives, but from a physicist's point of view, they're actually the exact same thing (depending on what kind of physics you're doing).
In our day to day lives, we define motion as a distance traveled over some amount of time. However, if distances and intervals of time are the exact same thing, that suddenly becomes completely meaningless. "I traveled one foot for every foot that I traveled" is an absolutely absurd statement!
The way it works is that everything in the universe travels through spacetime at some speed which I'll call "c" for the sake of brevity. Remember, motion in spacetime is meaningless, so it makes sense that nothing could be "faster" or "slower" through spacetime than anything else. Everybody and everything travels at one foot per foot, that's just... how it works.
Obviously, though, things do seem to have different speeds. The reason that happens is that time and space are orthogonal, which is sort of a fancy term for "at right angles to each other." North and east, for example, are orthogonal: you can travel as far as you want directly to the north, but it's not going to affect where you are in terms of east/west at all.
Just like how you can travel north without traveling east, you can travel through time without it affecting where you are in space. Conversely, you can travel through space without it affecting where you are in time.
You're (presumably) sitting in your chair right now, which means you're not traveling through space at all. Since you have to travel through spacetime at c (speed of light), though, that means all of your motion is through time.
By the way, this is why time dilation happens: something that's moving very fast relative to you is moving through space, but since they can only travel through spacetime at c, they have to be moving more slowly through time to compensate (from your point of view).
Light, on the other hand, doesn't travel through time at all. The reason it doesn't is somewhat complicated, but it has to do with the fact that it has no mass.
Something that isn't moving that has mass can have energy: that's what E = mc² means. Light has no mass, but it does have energy. If we plug the mass of light into E=mc², we get 0, which makes no sense because light has energy. Hence, light can never be stationary.
Not only that, but light can never be stationary from anybody's perspective. Since, like everything else, it travels at c through spacetime, that means all of its "spacetime speed" must be through space, and none of it is through time.
So, light travels at c. Not at all by coincidence, you'll often hear c referred to as the "speed of light in a vacuum." Really, though, it's the speed that everything travels at, and it happens to be the speed that light travels through space at because it has no mass.
edit: By the way, this also covers the common ELI5 question of why nothing can ever travel faster than light, and why things with mass cannot travel at the speed of light. Since everything moves through spacetime at c, nothing can ever exceed it (and no, traveling backwards in time would not fix that). Also, things with mass can always be "stationary" from someone's perspective (like their own), so they always have to move through time at least a little bit, meaning they can never travel through space as fast as light does. They'd have to travel through spacetime faster than c to do that, which, again, is not possible.

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At work, while discussing our architecture, we categorized one of the feature areas as "Permissive Drunken monkeys"

So Good They Can't Ignore You...

It's all common sense.

Passion often happens after you succeed at something, not before. Before is angst, hard work, effort, practice and building your skills. Do what you can be paid the most for. The passion will grow.

Chasing passion can be dangerous. "The pleasures and sorrows of work" also touched on this idea. There is a naïve thinking behind passion. Many people believe that if they follow there passion, their happiness and desires will follow. Not true. Life can still be hard. You still must work at it. Passion may help you over the hump, it does not prevent problems.

This book argues that many people who preach "follow your passion" do so only by looking at the past with rose coloured glasses. There was a time when they were doing it for the money, then the success came, their passion grew out of the success.  

One thing Amazon Fresh can do that my normal grocer can't… email me product recalls.

General Principle: the solutions (on balance) need to be simpler than the problems.

(Otherwise the system collapses under its complexity). Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Better Angels of our nature

By Stephen Pinker.

The book is very interesting. It argues that violence is decreasing over time, and goes into how and why.

But that's not what I want to remember.

One of the common themes in this book deals with the perspective switch from "idealism" to "integrated complexity"

idealists often hold a common narrative. They believe the world is unhealthy and on the wrong path. All our problems would be solved if only everyone believed in … Marxism, Nazism, Capitalism, Socialism, the Catholic Church, Anti-Islamacists, Anti-Americanism; whatever. People who don't support your cause are demonized. A revolution or judgment day is pushed to deal with these troublemakers. Once  get rid of these people our problems will be solved.

Of course the great judgment, the big revolution is destructive and inconclusive.

The alternative is to acknowledge our "integrated complexity," the fact that we have to make compromises. But, not to give up and accept the problems, but to dig in and understand the different dimensions of the problems, the different viewpoints, their connections, synergies, balances and compromises.

One of the reasons why we like ideologies and shy away from "integrated complexity" is that we like to believe in stories. An emotionally compelling story of good v.s. evil is far more believable and motivating that a more probable explanations that results in a set of compromises that must be resolved by hard work.