Nightmare
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Imagine it. It's the worst-case scenario for some people—immigrants of different skin color stream across an unprotected border, searching for a better life. With them, they bring the lifestyles of their home country. Unfortunately, their host country had laws banning the practices. After some time, the host country moves to enforce the federal laws of the land. The newcomers successfully resist the authorities with violence. After successfully defying federal law enforcement, the immigrants become separatists and declare an independent state. The situation worsens when the immigrants' home country decides to annex the newly independent state. A war between the countries ultimately ensues.
Is this a white supremacist's worst nightmare? Hardly. Check your history books, albeit not ones approved in Texas public schools. It is the birth story of the state of Texas. The federally illegal practice that the immigrants bring with them? It's slavery, introduced by Americans moving into what was northeast Mexico.
March 19, 2023 Longer Run
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I remember reading a quote from one of running's iconic coaches, Lydiard, or someone of his stature, years ago. Paraphrasing, he said the long run does not start until seventeen miles. I thought it was a ridiculously elitist thing to say. But I came to understand why he said it. Runs of increasing length run moderately fast are about increasing connective tissue and muscle strength, greater mitochondrial density, capitalization, and increases in myoglobin, heart muscle strength, and running efficiency. But around seventeen or eighteen miles, if running fast enough, the runner will have consumed a substantial portion of her glycogen, the carbohydrate stored in muscle for immediate use while exercising. The body uses a mix of fat and glycogen for energy production. At rest, while walking or running slowly, the primary energy source is fat. As effort and speed increase, the body derives more energy from glycogen, which is more efficiently converted to power the muscles. An ultra-marathoner can run past 26.2 miles with no energy issues because she is running more slowly and getting more energy from her unlimited fat reserves. However, a marathon's point is to run for a time goal. At that pace, glycogen depletion becomes an issue, and the runner can hit the infamous Wall. The long run, which is longer than 17 miles, is crucial for the marathoner. During this training, the marathoner adapts her physiology to the demands of running 26.2 miles and her biochemical energy pathways to run faster while burning more fat proportionally.
I understand and respect what that number represents as someone who has run past 17 miles many times. That's why I cannot bring myself to call my seven miles a long run. "Long run" holds a special place in my mind as training, sometimes testing, oneself for the Wall. It is a training modality reserved for the marathoner.
Covid, Python, Data Science and Gun Deaths
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In 2020, as the pandemic’s momentum gathered, my employer reduced our workforce to 50% by having us work alternating weeks. The goal of the reduction was to slow spread by keeping us more physically separated. When this had limited effect and as the pandemic spread, we went to a skeleton crew and only mission-essential staff went to work. In the months off, I had the time to investigate the latest technologies that were of interest to me.
My initial data science interested arose when tracking the international Covid-related data. The infection rates were not per capita. Absolute infection numbers when comparing Italy and, say, the United States were absolutely meaningless. I remember coming across a chart showing the infections for “selected countries”. The U.S., of course, was present and ranking at or near the top. But what about the other “selected countries”. What was the selection heuristic? How would the U.S. fare in a ranking of all countries? The inability to find graphs showing this information hugely frustrated me. I began a search for a way to represent the data myself.
I discovered Python, the first scripting language that I actually liked. Perl can be amazingly arcane. Any language whose design motto is “There’s more than one way to do it.” is going to present a neophyte with a bewildering array of choices to do even simple tasks. The code is full of side effects that, while nifty for those who call themselves Perl Monks, is confusing to the rest of us. This makes for a steep learning curve. Ruby is an elegant fully object-oriented language, but no one uses it. Then there’s Python. It took the world by storm, beginners and experienced programmers alike. Since then, scientists and researchers have adopted it, implementing a huge amount of programming packages to support their needs.
Learning Python brought me to Matplotlib. It’s a wonderful, hugely powerful visualization library. It can possibly display any kind of two-dimensional visualization in existence. I am recognizing its use in many research papers as it implements many statistical tools such as error bars. Armed with it, I wondered, after still another of America’s mass shootings, just what is the relationship between per capita gun ownership and per capita gun deaths. I downloaded the data from worldpopulation.com, a nice source of data in CSV format.
With Matplotlib, I produced the chart below. I used another software package, the scikit-learn machine learning library, to do a least-squares fit on the data. It produced a coefficient of correlation of 0.345, which denotes a weak positive association between gun ownership and deaths. I left out Wyoming as its gun ownership is extremely high on the basis that it is legitimate to exclude outliers.
I liked my chart but found myself wondering about the individual states. Which are they?
https://vause.info/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/gun_deaths-1024x598.png
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I was tantalized by the wonderful visualizations on websites like ourworldindata.org, another great site for open-source data. To my delight, I found bokeh. Bokeh enables interactive mouse over events. It is another visualization package, perhaps not as able to produce the plethora of graph types as Matplotlib, but it does one thing that Matplotlib does not: user interaction. Now I could mouse over my states and produce popups with information called “tooltips”.
I believe that a good visualization encourages further questions. Of course, mine did. I moused over some of the states with the lowest death rates. Hmmm. They were mostly Democratic: Hawaii, Connecticut, New Jersey, even New York. Then I moused over some of the states with the highest death rates: Louisiana, Alaska, Montana. This lead to my next thought. Why don't I color code by party affiliation? Thus, I produced this (mouse-over for individual state information) :
The Enchiridion by Epictetus
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As in a voyage, when the ship is at anchor, if you go on shore to get water, you may amuse yourself with picking up a shellfish or a truffle in your way, but your thoughts ought to be bent toward the ship, and perpetually attentive, lest the captain should call, and then you must leave all these things, that you may not have to be carried on board the vessel, bound like a sheep; thus likewise in life, if, instead of a truffle or shellfish, such a thing as a wife or a child be granted you, there is no objection; but if the captain calls, run to the ship, leave all these things, and never look behind. But if you are old, never go far from the ship, lest you should be missing when called for.
Epictetus
Stream of Body
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98% of the atoms in the human body are replaced every year (1). The body is an ever changing stream. Nothing about it is constant.
Eco's Ur-Fascism
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21st Century Genocide
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Global Warming and Capitalism.
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I was thinking about capitalism, shareholder capitalism, economic expansion, consumerism, and global warming.
Stream of Mind
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Fundamental Principles of Mind: objectivity, empiricism, limits, evolution, and turtles.
Pre-Run
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No part of me wants to go out there this morning. It is already 75 F and 0615. I'm late for my run on the hottest morning of the year. I have coffee and a slice of bread with peanut butter. I remember yesterday's 7 miler. To run like that is to completely embrace sweat. It runs down my entire body, stinging my eyes. It is an embrace of what humans evolved to be. We evolved sweat glands as we chased prey across the savanna. But upright, we have an advantage. With each gallop, our target's hind legs come forward together, compressing its abdominal cavity and pushing up against its diaphragm. This compresses the area available for the lungs to expand, hindering its inhalation. Humans, however, run unimpeded, with the additional benefit that we can carry weapons with our non-running limbs to make up for our lack of claws and teeth.
It is hot out there, in contrast to my dry home, cooled to a comfortable 76 F. But being cool and comfortable is not natural. It is not even healthy.
Fear
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I grew up in an imperfect household, like many, if not most of us. One of the lessons clearly instilled in me at an early age was that responsibility and duty are primary. I read the Odyssey at 12. Odysseus had a primary responsibilty to return to Ithaca. I started the Iliad, but could not find my way to go through it. I could not experience the origin of Western literature. It was just too hard, too coldly violent for me to experience. I have picked up the book several times over my 60 years, it remains true to today. I cannot read it. I understand that the Classical Greeks, the people that gave birth to the entire Western Civilization, were an unimaginably hard people.
In 9th grade, my English teacher used to select passages of literature, have us read them, and then do a writing assignment describing our reaction to them. Looking back all those decades, I know there must have been dozens of assignments. But the 14 year old boy only remembered one, which I quote, probably with small errors, here: “Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant only taste of death but once. Of all the strange things I have ever heard, it seems to me most strange that men fear death, given that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” (Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar)
We get one journey through life. After that, nothing. For most of us, we may be remembered by the generation that succeeds us, but thereafter, our lives are consigned to be utterly unremembered.
Given inescapable annihilation, we must choose how to create ourselves on the canvas of a lifetime. We can chose to do it with a nod to excellence, an embrace of responsibility and duty, and a touch of panache. The alternative is to amount to nothing.
1/2/2018 Running with Dogs
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While on a run, I thought of Candace Burt's recent post about running with her dogs. Current research suggests that dogs were domesticated from wolves multiple times in multiple places as humans spread across the Earth. This suggests that the mutual benefits were strong. It is easy to see how homo sapiens or even his predecessors derived advantage from this partnership. Proto dogs brought increased visual, aural, and olfactory acuity to the relationship. Wolves and humans are nearly unique in their ability to trot and run across vast distances to hunt or, in the case of humans, gather. Some paleoarcheologists believe that running may have been humans' killer advantage in competition for scarce food. But, as I run and think of dogs as running companions, have to wonder if the partnership between humans and dogs might have been the actual advantage that propelled humans to the position of apex predator. Dogs extend human hunting senses far beyond our natural limitations. It is easy to envision how this was a strong selective mechanism on both species; we both ate well thanks to the partnership. When the night came, humans must succumb to sleep in a world of night time predators. Any dog owner knows what good sentinels his partners can be. Likewise, with our relative lack of need to sleep, proto dogs may have gained increased protection by remaining near human encampments.
As Canis Lupus slowly became Canis lupus became Canis lupus familiaris, it became the only animal that could actually read human facial expressions, as research now suggests. This would be valuable feedback to man's best friend as not all humans and not all human emotions are beneficial to dogs. There is some preliminary research suggesting that dogs can even communicate back to humans with facial expressions of their own, increasing the richness of the inter-species communication. One can view the human-dog relationship, at least in hunter-gatherer societies, as a symbiotic one.
In light of this, we can understand the human love for dogs and their mindless, instinctive need for us, no matter how we often treat them. We can also think of those who abuse them as something proto-human, sub-human.