Category: Uncategorized

I ran a marathon! At the end of March, I started running to stay active while my gym was closed. It went better than I expected so I kept running and running. I set a goal of a 2 hour half-marathon. As I neared that goal, I got notions of training for a marathon despite the uncertainty of a marathon even happening. This race was a bit unusual. They have the course open for 2 weeks, I relied on Kelly to be my water stations, and we had to cross some active intersections. But I did it! I set a conservative goal of 8:30/mile pace and an aggressive goal of 8:00 pace. I came dang close to that at 8:05/mile and felt surprisingly good throughout the race. A big thank you to Kelly who not only was my personal aid station today, but spent many mornings solo parenting while I was out running (sometimes for 3 hours…)

After my marathon, I have now gone on 175 runs this year totaling 1285 miles and 200 hours. To train, I followed the 12 week 55-70 mile plan from Advanced Marathoning by Pete Pfitzinger and Scott Douglas. Before that I was following base training plans from Faster Road Racing by Pftizinger and Philip Latter. The marathon training plan was quite time-consuming. I felt pretty sick of running the final few weeks leading up to the race. However I think it put me in a great position to exceed my expectations. While I set a goal pace of 8:00/mile, that only entered my mind on my final tune-up run on the Tuesday of race week. My initial goal at the start of training was four hours or 9:09/mile.

I spent some time yesterday analyzing my race data. I ran miles 6-20 all below my average pace. Before that, I was mainly warming up and getting down to race pace. After that, I was struggling to stay as close to race pace as possible. I was able to push myself at the very end and ran mile 26 at 7:53, twelve seconds faster than my overall pace.

A handful of people have already asked me if I want to do another marathon. There was a stretch during the race (I’d say miles 18-24) where I thought “ok I can check this off my bucket list, no way am I ever doing this again”. But I’m actually leaning towards doing more marathons right now. My training plan includes a five week recovery plan which will basically take me through the end of 2020. At that point I’ll actually have to decide if I want to start training for another marathon. Right now I’m considering attempting to qualify for the Chicago marathon, which would require a time of 3 hours and 10 minutes. A 22 minute improvement sounds difficult but plausible to me.

Kelly and I have lived in our condo for a little over three years now. Things around here have started to break at a consistent pace, likely accelerated by the fact that we are home all the time now during lockdown.

Our laundry has been coming out a little funky. This is not due to lockdown but the fact that Henry (nearing one year old) is getting his clothes covered in food. This forced us to discover some elements of the washer and dryer that are supposed to cleaned out regularly (not sure we’ve done that since we moved in).

Our toilet paper holders have become loose / fallen off. They have an element that needs to be tightened with an odd looking screw head. I purchased a computer repair kit (for another step in this process) which included the required screw head. With that tool, this was an easy fix.

We have two toilets that use Koehler flushless technology. It’s an incredibly stupid device that we hate. They have all kinds of issues: sometimes they run endlessly, sometimes they don’t run at all, and they use up batteries endlessly (I eventually bought rechargeable batteries). I looked into switching to standard flush tech, but that would run us around $150. Not awful, but I’m not sure how long we will live here. I spoke with Koehler and explained that our units have just stopped flushing even after replacing the batteries. The flush units we have have been discontinued but they were kind enough to send us 2 of the new units that have replaced ours. So far they are working alright.

My laptop (a 3 year old Dell) has been running a little slow and Kelly’s (a 6 year old MacBook Pro) has been running very slow. I installed new RAM (Kelly went from 4 GB to 16, I went from 8 GB to 16) and new solid-state hard drives. For Kelly I simply cloned her existing hard drive. For me, I started from scratch installing both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 in a dual-boot setup. Then I copied over the files I needed from my old hard drive. I would rate these upgrades a strong success. The computers are booting up and running very fast and I love Ubuntu for programming. I was very pleased with how easy it was to copy over my iTunes library including metadata like play counts. When I was pulling my old hard drive out of my computer, the SATA cable came out from my computer. I was petrified. It turned out there was a latch I have pulled out and once I tucked the cable under it (and aligning it up with some tiny pins) and put the latch down, everything was fine.

Our dishwasher is leaking. I did some research and it looks like there are a number of possible causes. It isn’t clear to me how to diagnose the exact cause and most of the fixes look above my pay grade. I think we will be calling a plumber for that one.

In our bedroom, we have noticed some serious paint blemishes. About 18 months ago our condo was the victim of serious damage due to a nearby construction project. Our unit was fixed up & painted including this wall. Based on my research of paint blemishes, it seems the two most likely causes are underlying moisture or improper painting (I.e. painting on a wet surface). I’m working with our property manager to see if we can diagnose the exact issue. If this is the result of poor work by the repair crew, I’d like to get them involved in repairing the poor repair.

A friend sent me “The debate over ending social distancing to save the economy, explained” by Ezra Klein and asked for my thoughts. Here they are:

I absolutely think people need to be willing to have this discussion weighing the economic costs of essentially shutting off the economy, as uncomfortable as that may make them. In my opinion we should *all* want the economy to restart ASAP. Even if it really needs to be shutdown for a while, it should be as short as possible.

The hardest aspect of this is that the data on the virus is fuzzy. Very very fuzzy. How fatal is it? How many people who get it require a ventilator? I think you want enough social distancing to keep ventilator demand below supply.

There have been a number of arguments recently around the theme of: we have been overestimating the fatality rate. Some are more strongly argued than others.

I think the best way to know this is if we can do antibody testing of random samples to answer the question: Have a lot of people in the US already had it and developed immunity? If so, we can conclude this is actually not that fatal and we can end social distancing pretty soon.

Initial estimates from the WHO were that the fatality rate is around 3-4%. That is CRAZY high. The flu is like 0.1%.
For a while my best guess has been 1% but I’m just a guy on the internet. At the start of March my best estimate was 500k Americans dead. Really not sure how far down to adjust that based on the fact that we’ve gone hardcore social distancing.

I’m not sure when but at some point in the past 10 days I feel like I’ve gone from feeling like society is vastly underrating Covid to feeling like society is slightly overrating it.

I was definitely in favor of hardcore voluntary social distancing. Statewide shelter-in-place and shutdown of “non-essential businesses”…I don’t know. I know that’s a frustrating answer but it’s really hard to say and I felt even less certain when they really started picking up Monday. And I say this as a libertarian with a very strong skepticism of such harsh government measures.

As of today I’m leaning towards lifting them soon and we just need to worry about the major metro areas, but I don’t feel confident either way. I want that random sample antibody testing to make a determination about how many Americans we expect to require ventilators over the next few weeks.

I’m glad Ezra included the Hammer & Dance strategy, I think it does a good job of taking into account how miserable for society social distancing is.

One big point: Getting the cost/benefit between the possible deaths & the economic damage is basically impossible. Because of exponential growth, there isn’t really a point at which you can say “ok the deaths so far has been low, but we want to stop it at this point”. By that point, it’s already too widespread. Like a wildfire you can’t put out and just keeps spreading. So if you’re going to attempt mitigation, it is going to look premature.

I think the after-debate on this issue is going to be ugly. People are going to believe what they want to believe about how bad the virus really was and how much social distancing mattered and how much economic damage was done. It is going to be really hard to prove these theories one way or the other. We might attempt to compare say California (hard early lockdown) vs Florida (still not doing a shelter in place). But it will be hard and people will hand wave stuff away.

I don’t have as much time to spend on this as I had the past few seasons, but I wanted to post my model’s projections for this season before tipoff tonight!

Yesterday I wrote about how I spent time last week diving into Bitcoin and Ethereum. Well I have already started attempting to contribute to Ethereum.

py-evm is a Python implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. py-evm and its related client Trinity aim to become the standard for Python Ethereum implementations.

In checking out the code on GitHub, I noticed an open issue which fit my skill level. The main package is to be renamed from evm to eth. Changing this is a lot like taking a contract and changing one of the company’s names. However you can’t just do find & replace like in a Word document, in case you alter something that refers to something close to the company name, but isn’t exactly the company name.

I made some serious progress last night, but still have more work to do. Regardless, the maintainers recommended I submit a work in progress pull request. Wish me luck I’m on the right track!

I have been meditating for the past 10 days. I aim to meditate at 9:30 pm every night, although that doesn’t always happen. I got home and meditated later than that after seeing Maps & Atlases and also last night after seeing Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

I’m trying to exercise more which (partially) means exercising before work more. Which means more days where I need to wake up at 6 am. If I had to I could stay up late and wake up at 6 am basically every day. But the point of getting up at 6 am more often is for health. So if I’m going to do that, I want to do so while also maintaining 8 hours of sleep. That sure sounds easy, right? Not.

And so that means getting into bed around 9:30 pm. Except when I started attempting this routine, I would just get in bed and toss around for a few hours.

Hence, the meditation. And while I don’t feel like I get much out of it in the moment (although, while I’m new and don’t really understand it, I don’t think that’s the right way to think about it), or feel different overall, I have been having an easier time falling asleep by 10 pm than I was before meditating.

10 straight days down, we’ll see how long I can keep that streak alive and how long I can keep alive a streak of general repetition. Tonight is the first of two nights I’m staying with friends in Chicago and then next week I’ll be at my family’s cottage with a large group of friends for over a week. We’ll see how these changes to my overall routine impact the meditation routine.

Last night I watched the movie Gattaca. I had never heard of it until Scott Alexander wrote about it on his blog Slate Star Codex. I really enjoyed the movie although I think the message the filmmakers were going for was a bit hollow.

The premise: In a society where parents can control the genetics of their offspring, a non-genetically engineered man poses as a man with “high genes” to become an astronaut and fly to Titan.

Apparently, at its 1997 release it dramatically raised the visibility of a genetic engineering future. Today, I hear about trans-humanism fairly often (that’s also partially a result of running in weirdo-libertarian circles)

My attitude towards genetic engineering is that of my attitude towards pretty much all technology: sounds great, I’m sure there will be some downsides, but with enough time and trial & error individuals will put it to good use. While I think a society as depicted in Gattaca, where you can’t get a high-status job without high-status genes, is far-fetched, I could see the general thrust being true.

But I don’t think you’ll see employers taking peoples’ blood samples and running them through a computer (beep boop beep) to make decisions. You’ll still still be looking for who gets the job done best and, yes, genetics will help put people ahead in a lot of situations. But if genetics isn’t everything even in professional sports, I sure don’t see it being everything in astronautics. Or any other field.

You should read Scott’s blog post. If you’re terrified by the future presented in Gattaca, look around you for the similarities we hold today.

Last night I saw the band Maps & Atlases perform at Rock and Roll Hotel. They are a band I have followed a bit throughout their career. I like their second album Beware and Be Grateful so I was glad they played a bunch of songs from it. Earlier this month they released a new album Lightlessness Is Nothing New. I listened to it once yesterday before going to the show. I enjoyed one song but was not very impressed. They didn’t really focus on it during the concert and I was not exactly intrigued to listen to it much more. However, they put on an enjoyable performance.

They have been known as a “math rock” band, and that showed from the beginning as singer/guitarist Dave Davison showcased his tapping skills on guitar in the opening song. Drummer Chris Hainey also put on an impressive performance with a lot of power behind it. The crowd was largely stoic, although they got more energetic for Old & Gray / Fever.

The opening act, Prism Tats, was downright painful. But I guess that’s what you get for an opening act at a half-filled Tuesday evening concert.

The 2017-2018 NBA season begins tomorrow night! Here are my predictions for how many games each team will win this season. Below is my expected wins for each team, the Vegas line, and the difference between my prediction and the line.

Teams I am really high on: Timberwolves, Cavaliers, Knicks, Rockets, and Hawks.
Teams I am really low on: Lakers, Trailblazers, Celtics, Bucks, Clippers, Grizzlies, Pistons, Spurs.

Golden State Warriors (67) Same historical greatness, snooze. They’re probably better than last year, too.
Cleveland Cavaliers (62) They absolutely won the trade with Boston and will not miss Kyrie. The only question is how many games will Thomas play in.
Minnesota Timberwolves (60) This is probably a bug in my model, but it’s worth keeping in mind that Towns and Butler are both elite and Wiggins is no slouch.
Houston Rockets (60) I’m suspicious of the Chris Paul pickup but this roster is really talented and D’Antoni is one of the best coaches in the NBA.
Oklahoma City Thunder (53) They had a huge offseason and are going to be much, much better than last year but Carmelo probably won’t add that many wins.
San Antonio Spurs (50) Of teams in the top I think the Spurs are most dependent on their star, if Kawhi misses extended time they could be in serious trouble.
Washington Wizards (48) IMO the best of this 3-way tie, I think they’ll actually make it to the Conference Finals. The Frazier addition at backup PG should be a quiet but big win.
Toronto Raptors (48) They will do the same old thing, which may frustrate their fanbase, but they’ll feast on the East and fight for the 2 seed.
Boston Celtics (48) So I have a 3-way tie here and I get that looks like a cop out but that’s just what the machines tell me to predict. But for Boston I’m low on Kyrie and they’ll play a lot of young players. Horford is a regression candidate.
Denver Nuggets (47) This team is young and exciting and plays amazing offense but that’s only enough to get you the 6 seed in the West. Look for the 6th best offense but 22nd defense.
Utah Jazz (43) People will tune in to Jazz games and have no other option than to recognize Gobert is the best defensive player in the NBA. 43 feels high but they’ll likely just feed on weak Eastern Conference teams.
Charlotte Hornets (43) He may not look that great this season but I’m really high on Malik Monk, I think he’ll be the best player from this draft.
Miami Heat (43) The team profile they have created for themselves is an incredibly deep roster full of professional NBA players worth playing but none of them are even remotely a household name.
New Orleans Pelicans (42) The great Twin Towers experiment will continue to be so-so and the Rondo addition will be a disaster for both him and Cousins.
Milwaukee Bucks (41) Giannis is an MVP candidate but they will dearly miss Paker. Also I think Brogdon is a dark horse regression candidate.
Los Angeles Clippers (38) Small ball has become so ingrained in how I view the NBA that I think of the Clippers and I think “who do they even have?” The answer is Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordon, the question is are they valuable without Chris Paul or not.
New York Knicks (37) This team is probably a dumpster fire but Carmelo leaving is probably a good thing, Porzingis is really good, and there are a handful of other teams in the East that are worse.
Dallas Mavericks (36) I really don’t have anything to say about the Mavs. Dennis Smith?
Philadelphia 76ers (35) Ok the hype for this team is way overblown. I think Simmons will look great except for shooting, Fultz will be a serviceable disaster, and Embiid will look amazing in 45 games. If he plays over 60 I think he wins MVP.
Portland Trailblazers (35) I bet they wish they could trade conferences with the Raptors. They’re basically the Raptors except they pay Even Turner $16 million (ouch).
Detroit Pistons (34) Drummond is going to be about as impactful as Joakim Noah in two season at this piace. Reggie Jackson will be improved from last year, though.
Indiana Pacers (33) So they absolutely flunked the Paul George sweepstakes and my cynical take is they wanted Oladipo to sell tickets because Indiana. They’ll be bad but Oladipo and Turner is a decent enough pair compared to some of the teams below they’ll avoid being a dumpster fire.
Memphis Grizzlies (32) I can’t really figure out what the Grizzlies are trying to accomplish, I am suspicious they are making a serious effort at winning basketball games.
Orlando Magic (31) On the other hand the Grizzlies could be so, so much worse. They’ll lose lots of games by 5, 6 points but the Magic will get blown out night in and night out. This roster is so bad and I want to see Aaron Gordon play somewhere else already.
Phoenix Suns (29) The 76ers of the West, they are building up a decent arsenal of young talent that could have an impact in four years.
Atlanta Hawks (27) Bad without impressive assets, I guess they just have to be glad of the plague that is Dwight Howard.
Brooklyn Nets (26) They have no incentive to tank but after losing Brook Lopez, their current roster is going to struggle to win games. My model is probably underestimating Russell’s positive impact, but only slightly, and while I’m high on that pickup I’m low on the Crabbe addition.
Sacramento Kings (25) There is no real difference maker on this team, Buddy Hield will probably be their best player.
Chicago Bulls (24) Please kill me.
Los Angeles Lakers (23) I get that they have a large, rabid, media-connected fanbase but my goodness is this hype train out of control or what? This roster is bad, they have nobody who can shoot, and Lonzo is going to be a great NBA player just not this season.

Yesterday I started participating in the website Quora. Quora is an online community for people to pose questions and answer the questions posed by others. It has been around in 2009 and had 17 million visitors as of February 2016.

At first I was unsure how to get involved. So far I have found three main ways of participating: reading questions that have been answered, answering questions that have been asked, and asking questions. To start I read some answered questions. They were fairly interesting but all over the place and there was definitely a shaky signal-to-noise ratio. I wanted to take a shot at answering some questions, even if I wasn’t the most qualified to do so, as a way to get more into it and get my brain juices flowing. It can be hard to find questions that aren’t already answered but I was able to find some. The topics I have focused on so far have been football, music (particularly songwriting), politics (particularly libertarianism), and management.

I’m hoping to continue answering questions as a brain exercise and to read some interesting threads with answered questions. I posed my first question today (about strategies for libertarian change) and am curious to see if I get any responses.