I grew up in a suburb of Chicago and naturally we got around by driving around in cars, and I've had my own car since I graduated from college and got a full-time job back at the end of 1995, so I really am used to driving around in cars. I'm not some frequent-flyer air-traveler, but I was out of the country twice as a child and have been around a bit as an adult, too. Still, just these last few weeks I found the long-distance travel I've done pretty interesting to think about.

I traveled to Vancouver, British Columbia, by way of first flying to Toronto, which is pretty much the exact wrong direction to travel. I've driven my car to Toronto (for FKO), and it took me two days, one very long day to get to Port Huron, Michigan, and then about a half day to get to Toronto. Starting in Chicago some people consider Toronto to be doable in one day, most likely with more than one person trading off driving duty, but Milwaukee is at least two more hours of driving, and I was alone. You would never choose to drive to Vancouver with a stop in Toronto if you had no reason to go to Toronto, that would be completely crazy. But by regional jet, Toronto is just a one-hour flight from Milwaukee. It almost seems like the shortest distance it makes any sense to bother flying-time airborne is less than the time you'll spend in the airports-yet it takes two days in a car. It took about five hours to get from Toronto to Vancouver (against the wind) and about four hours the other direction with the wind and in a slightly faster airplane.

I was looking at the maps and the speed and altitude displays on the entertainment systems of the A320 and the 777, and just thinking in terms of running and cycling. The altitude in cruise of the various jets I was on varied from about FL330 on up to FL390 in the 777-200LR. The Flight Levels are effectively air pressure in funny units and the height above mean sea level varies with the weather, and the ground out west juts up into the sky by an amount that seems amazing to us flatlanders, but it's close enough to say that at times I was some 11 kilometers above the ground. It depends on how hard I'm working at it, but in general my 10km run time is in the general neighborhood of 50 minutes. Our altitude was a distance that would be roughly an hour of running on level ground, but the climb isn't really the long part of the journey.

When you get used to 11km/hr being a pretty good speed (running) or think 40km/hr is huge speed (on a bicycle), or end up planning commute times on the basis of a 10km/hr running average or a 20km/hr cycling average (traffic lights and stop signs are a killer compared to what you could do in a race on a closed course), getting out on the Interstate and cruising for extended intervals at 88km/hr (55MPH) seems very fast, and the airliner speeds over 900km/hr are really just amazing. Crossing Lake Michigan in a seemingly trivial amount of time was a delight. It is just a whole different thing. A thing that involves burning fuel on a scale very different from burning through "bars" and "gels" on a day-long bicycle journey. A US gallon of gasoline is worth something like 31,500 kcal. An elite athlete can burn 8000+ kcal in a day. A very fuel efficient car driven somewhat slowly can burn a gallon of gasoline in an hour, and something like a Subaru station wagon can burn as much as three gallons an hour. A pickup truck much more. A jet burns through fuel at an amazing rate, but it also has a lot more than one person on board typically. If filled up, on a per-person basis an airliner is closer to a single-occupant Prius than a single-occupant SUV, though it is very much faster. The air is thin up high in the flight levels.

I drove to the southern end of the Chicago area this weekend. It was a hot weekend with a strong wind out of the south bringing us the warm air. You feel the wind running, and generally appreciate it in the warmer months. While cycling the wind is a very obvious thing, aiding or hindering you. In an airplane you cruise at a more-or-less set airspeed and the wind speeds or slows you. In a car, in contrast, you cruise at a set ground speed and have power available far in excess of what you need for any legal speed, so you set power as needed to maintain speed in whatever wind you have. My car has a display of miles/gallon available, and I found it interesting to see it reading only down in the low to mid 50s MPG (at 55 miles/hour) on the trip south, and then returning north mostly well up in the 60s, dragging the trip average up to 61. (This display is a few MPG optimistic compared to the figure you get from the odometer divided by the gas station pump display). You can't feel the wind the way you do under human power, but you can see it in the numbers! Again, being used to working fairly hard to maintain 30 km/hr, doing 88 km/hr for hours while resting, with the air conditioner blowing cool air at a temperature controllable with the press of a button with my left thumb, really seems amazing. I think people get very jaded about car driving, but in about seven hours of physical comfort with generally minor mental effort I traveled a distance that would take days on a bicycle, and burned fuel that cost under $20.

I went to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, for the American Society for Mass Spectrometry conference. This was, naturally, business-related travel. I know that people who travel for work all the time mostly hate it, but I very rarely get sent on business trips, so it really does remain a fun adventure for me. Mostly, actually, I go to someplace in the Chicago area, the next big city over, which isn't so exciting because I grew up there and travel there for fun frequently, but it also isn't very hard to do, just two hours of driving, or 90 minutes on a train to go to the actual city center. Trips far away are much rarer and, as I say, are a fun adventure even if the actual travel is something of a nuisance.

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I've been sick with an annoying viral cold/flu/thing and so I spent the cold rainy weekend indoors at home, watching videos on YouTube.  Let me tell you, you see amazing things in a few hours on youtube.  There are are things you might not have expected to exist, like ten minutes dedicated to flat-spotted train wheels.  Not a ten minute documentary on how flatspotted wheels get repaired, but a ten minute artistic celebration of that thing that every train has one of, the flatspotted wheel (thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump)

"Fail" is a major YouTube theme.  Crashes, wrecks, falls, impacts.  Engines blowing up in tractor pulls in such a way that afterwards you can look in through the new big hole in the side of the hood and see the crankshaft lying there, basically just where it normally is except with all the ...  engine ... that normally hides it from view having been blown off. 

There actually are some videos dedicated to success.  Amazing stunts that worked perfectly.  These are sort of hard to watch if you've see a lot of "fail." I kept expecting the head injury or the crotch impact instead of the perfectly-executed trick. 

I've said before that the "Suggestions" column is just a wonder of algorithmic serendipity.  Some of those suggestions make perfect sense (more train videos to go with the flatspot one!) other times...it's hard to say what's at work.  I assume anything with a few million views will end up there sooner rather than later.

And on that note, I think we can see confirmation of something we could probably guess.  I know that I don't really know who is watching what, and I recognize that gender is actually a very complex thing, but, overall, I think it's fair enough to say that it's men who will click, by the millions, on anything that vaguely promises boobies, and delivers about five seconds of boobies about three minutes into it.  There seem to be a lot of those, and they all have millions of views, and anything with millions of views will come up with a high rank in any listing the algorithms do, because there they always are, mixed in with the locomotive engines or the skateboarding crashes. 

Tom Murphy wrote in his blog "Do The Math" about phantom loads, the power wasted in devices that are basically turned off but still drawing a few watts of electricity:

Imagine that we assign specific tasks to power plants. We have the power plants assigned to lighting applications. There are a goodly number of power plants assigned to running televisions. We’ve got the hair dryer power plants—fewer now than in the big-hair era of the 1980′s. A worker at any one of these plants may feel proud to provide essential services to fellow citizens. Then you’ve got your dozen standby power plants. Imagine the morale at one of those plants: Wally working hard all day, coming home exhausted. But because of poor Wally, our printer could sit doing absolutely nothing and slurping power all day.

The idea makes me think of the YouTube comments database.  Unlike power plants, it's actually plausible that a team could be dedicated exclusively to the task of keeping the comments database running.  Can you imagine what that would be like?  Working hard all day for that?  And what is it about YouTube that brings that out in people to such an amazing level?  We're all sadly used to comments on web sites tending toward the low-value end of the scale in the absence of careful moderation, but, wow, YouTube is just an amazing collection of low-value comments, to say the very least. 

According to legend, in the early 1860s Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz had some sort of dream of snakes biting their own tails and, so inspired, figured out that benzene has a ring structure. I assume people still tell this tale a hundred and fifty years later because, really, how often does anything worthwhile occur to you in a dream?  For example, this morning the thought that came to me in a dream was "the stunt men are starting the day by setting loudspeakers on fire."  I really don't know what to say, other than that this idea isn't exactly in the same league as the structure of benzene.  At best, it sounds like a concept for cover art for a recording of some kind of music that would go with that sort of cover art.  I don't even know what kind of music that might be.  Presumably something really loud, or possibly inspired by Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

This morning the Amazon.com Elastic Tin Mechanical Cloud Whispering Turk "WhisperNet" "service" "wirelessly" delivered Let's Pretend This Never Happened to my reading device. According to the progress-bar-doohickey at the bottom of the Kindle screen I've read 27% of it, so I figure it's time to start writing some sort of book review.

I was never one of those people who highlighted passages in books with an obnoxious yellow marking pen, but I do sometimes like to highlight especially good bits in the Kindle because the computer then keeps track of them and they become searchable and shareable and get passed back to the Amazon mothership via the WhisperingTin Whispersync and then get cross-correlated with everyone else's highlights and somehow "monetized" so Jeff Bezos can ultimately buy an even bigger jet than the one he currently has (which according to something I found via the google is a rather-impressive three-engine Dassault Falcon). Anyway, the problem is, if I'm not careful I'll end up highlighting the whole darn thing, like one of those used textbooks I had in college that was previously owned by someone who bought an entire case of highlighters and decided that somehow it made more sense to highlight every single word in the book than to just scribble "good book, read it" on the cover. And then if I started tweeting everything I highlighted I'd end up just tweeting the whole book, which would be wrong, plus I've got the $79 Kindle that doesn't have a keyboard, so a hundred-odd character tweet feels like an eternity of writing selecting one letter at a time by clickclickclickclickclicking the little square button.

(If you think this post is weird and hard to read imagine what will happen to my writing style by the time I've read the whole book. This is just what 27% has done to me.)

Anyway, I recommend the book. The chicken will cut you, but the book won't give you anything worse than a papercut. The Kindle edition won't even do that. Although the Kindle does have a lithium battery in it, so it could catch on fire, and possible ignite your crotch. But this is very unlikely. Certainly I feel it's so unlikely that you shouldn't worry, and if you are a lawyer working for Amazon you shouldn't sue me for bringing up the highly-unlikely possibility. The paper version, of course, has no risk of a battery fire, but I understand that it is quite flammable and perfect for people who want to hold a book burning.  Really, read it or burn it, either way it counts as a sale, I'm pretty sure that's how the publisher sees it.

You might end up sitting in a coffee shop giggling uncontrollably while reading it, like I did this afternoon, but I'm pretty sure all the cool people do that.

Yesterday I found The Silent World on YouTube, the 1956 Jacques-Yves Cousteau film. I grew up watching the later Cousteau documentaries, but I don't recall seeing this earlier one. The underwater cinematography is superb, it doesn't look like someone in ninteen-fifty tried taking a camera down in a primitive housing to see if he could get some film, it looks rather like what you'd expect now. That must have been a tremendous amount of work back in the fifties.

Aside from the excellent quality of the camera work, it does look like an old film. In particular, the amount of killing of marine life, and general harassing of wildlife, is pretty shocking, particularly from a famous crew of environmentalists, though I guess back in 1956 you qualified as an environmentalist if you refrained from setting off a nuclear bomb in the open air. The scuba gear looks old, but until you look closely, or especially see them taking off the tanks on the surface, you don't realize just how old. The metal tanks are just strapped on with a couple of narrow straps. No pads, no fancy harness that adjusts in twelve ways, just metal tanks loosely affixed with a strap one step up from tying it on with a rope. And no buoyancy compensator. And no clothing beyond little shorts. Sure hope the water was warm. Nowadays people usually wear something even in very warm water, just to keep from being stung by every random tiny stinging marine critter. Those were tough dudes in those days. And speaking of dudes, there are some female turtles, but exactly 100% of the humans are men, because, naturally, back in 1956 women hadn't been invented yet. (I'm not clear on where babies used to come from, but it's not just this film, lots of sources clearly indicate that there weren't any women yet in those days.)

It's more-or-less spring now, though it's been feeling like summer recently, so I guess it's time for the annual winter in review post.  At any rate, the Pettit National Ice Center is in the process of melting off the 400 meter oval, so the speed skating season is over. ( Read more... )

Maybe I'm a little weird, and maybe I hang around with some slightly unusual people, but dang if the mundane world doesn't confuse me sometimes.  I was waiting in line at the grocery store checkout and saw a magazine that on the cover promised tips to shrink your thighs and calves.  Now, I hang around with speed skaters.  We have giant, beautiful thighs.  We're proud of them.  It takes a lot of work to build up quadriceps like these.  Bringing my context to it makes seeing "shrink your thighs" on a magazine cover seem pretty much like seeing "ten steps to a smaller penis" on a magazine cover.  It's just not advice you imagined anyone looking for. 

I've been spending a lot of time at the Pettit National Ice center, between the long-track speed skating and the running.  They often have the local "B-96!" radio station playing, and they seem to run "I love the 80s!" segments often.  I guess this is great for us old peoplemasters skaters, enabling us to relive our youth. 

One of the things we have now that we didn't in my youth is Google.  I heard a lot of popular songs (you could hardly avoid that), but if you just randomly hear stuff on the radio you're lucky if you hear what the actual song title is.  Filling my memory are a lot of names of famous bands, titles of songs, and lyrics and tunes, and, for the most part, no connections between them.  There are lots of really famous hits by really well-known bands for which I've certainly heard the song many times and of course I've heard of the band, but I never had any idea they did that.  And even in the case of the few groups I liked and was something of a fan of, all I knew was whatever they chose to print in the cassette tape "J-card" or the little booklet in the CD case.   It's not like there was a Wikipedia entry with additional trivia.

Now and then I hear something I remember from long ago and think to just type it into google and see what appears.  Remember "Tainted Love?"  It had a rather distinct sound, and was a big hit at one time.  Well, it was written by Ed Cobb and recorded by Gloria Jones in 1965.  Before I was born.  The version people my age who grew up in the USA remember was released by Soft Cell in 1981 in the UK.  A year or two later it was a big hit in the US.  Who knew?  I sure didn't.  I mean, it's not like it was a secret, but how would you happen to know?  Yes, the music video is on youtube. I'm so old I remember when MTV played music, but I don't recall seeing this back in the day. It is a glorious example of a weird early music video. The early days of MTV were weirdly wonderful. Everyone had to start producing music videos, but besides not necessarily having much of a budget, back then music videos had just been invented and no one knew what they were supposed to look like yet. Thus, they were fantastic.  ("Tainted Love" might not be much of an actual love song, but in my personal case what it reminds me of is holding hands, with a girl.  A witty and charming and cute girl, as I recall.)

And, speaking of wonderful music videos, I did see back in the day-but only a few times-the one for Chris De Burgh's "Don't Pay the Ferryman."  It's right here. That's truly a fantastic video from back in the day. 

I ran in the Icebreaker Indoor half marathon yesterday. It's held at the Pettit National Ice Center running track because, as I always say, if you are holding a running race in Milwaukee in January, you probably want to hold it indoors. This is my third year running the half marathon, and I think it's a great event and I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys running in circles. I think it's a lot more fun than people think it sounds like. We're all in there as a group, they have music playing and an announcer announcing, you go past the spectators constantly, and you go past the hydration table every 443 meters so you never have to worry about water. Unless you are one of them, you get passed repeatedly by the really fast runners, which is quite impressive to see. It's like they are doing some sort of interval workout, except the interval is 21.1 kilometers. And many of them are coming back the next day for 42.2km. If you aren't among the slowest then you in turn get to lap other runners, which makes it really feel like some sort of race. It takes about two laps for the field to spread out and start to sort out by speed, and after that for the most part it's not much problem to pass and be passed.

My time this year was 1:46:16, 64 seconds faster than my previous best half marathon, which was last year's Icebreaker. Best of all, nothing in particular ever hurt. There are ups and downs, times I felt good, times I felt really tired and just plain beat, but no foot blisters, weird knee pains, muscle cramps, or any other sort of specific injuries or pains.

I started long track speed skating because of the Icebreaker run. I signed up for the half marathon back in the fall of 2010 and did quite a bit of running in the Pettit center in preparation, mostly after work during the time the speed skating sessions are running. I saw the speed skaters and thought I wanted to try that, and now I'm out on the oval regularly. I thought it might be fun to do some speed skating during the running of the marathon today, and it was. I found out that I can match the speed of the marathon winner, but only if I have speed skates on. A few of the runners chatted briefly while I was gliding around the outside of the ice, and the skaters thought it was interesting that I'm also a runner and had run the half the previous day.

After a little more than an hour of mostly easy skating I went to Lapham Peak to ski. It was cloudy and a bit foggy today, but it turned out to be a really beautiful day at the park, with a frost effect coating trees and pine needles in parts of the park with ice crystals. After all the other activity I was going to take it slow, and it really was a pretty day to just ski around (and take some photos) and enjoy the place without athlete-ing around trying to achieve a fast time.

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