Santa Barbara Particulars

The fire began last Tuesday
And busily through the week
Had been covering Santa Barbara
In an evanescent reek.

I get the impression, from the inciweb site — though they are careful not to say anything explicit — that the fire has been contained toward the cities and the east but is continuing to grow west and northwest. Which suggests that the danger to my house (always slim) has become slimmer

However the air I breath is full of ash still, and it sounds as though that will continue for the foreseeable future. It doesn’t fall abundantly, but very gently, very slowly. I test this by leaving my bike locked up outside, and then, when I return an hour or two later finding a faint speckling of white ash upon my black seat.

I haven’t run outside since the fourth. I’ve been doing my runs on a treadmill in a gym — hoping that the air inside has been somewhat filtered and so less hazardous. This morning I arrived only to discover I had left my running shorts at home by mistake. So I ran in my bathing suit (which I had taken, by mistake. The bathing suit and short being roughly the same colour).

It’s warmer, inside, with no breeze; so I sweat more, which means I have to take my glasses off, which means I can’t see much of anything. I can’t recognize people who greet me. Another disadvantage of inside running is the question of how to blow my nose. Outside I can snort onto the ground, but that is not a reasonable option inside. A stack of tissues doesn’t work well because they tend to flutter away in air currents and even if they did hang around, they become so drenched the moment they touch my sweaty face that they can’t effectively absorb more moisture.

The treadmills at my gym have little signs on them saying you can only use them for half an hour if others are waiting. So far, others have not been waiting. My shortest workout is 45min. More annoying the treadmill will turn itself off after an hour — you go from full speed to a full stop in just a few seconds. Finally some of the treadmills will go no faster than 6 minute miles. That’s 10k race pace for me — a speed I like to surpass from time to time.

Normally we do a speed workout on the San Marcos track… but that’s the Red Cross evacuation center. It might be rather crass to wake them up at 6am. I may need a fast treadmill tomorrow

Yesterday afternoon the light was a watery brown, the sun veiled in smoke. Ash fell intermittently and lightly.

Today dawned all foggy. I hope that will give the fire a hard time. Yet the fog is probably low lying, and the fire above 1500ft so there may be bright sun for the fire.

Fog and smoke — a London Particular.

Why - Thank you!

Two friends pointed out to me that last Thursday the New York Times ran an article which briefly mentioned my program, FontForge. As far as I know this is the first time the conventional media has mentioned my work. So that was very neat.

But then I started complaining to myself about how they’d spent more time talking about another program which was far less capable than mine.

So I reminded myself of Drea’s comments the other day. Being mentioned at all is a compliment.

Why, Thank you!

Carolina Day

Today is Carolina Day.

A holiday most have never heard of. People tend to forget that the war of American Independence was fought in the South just as it was in the North. And so the battles in the South have been ignored.

The battles in Lexington and Concord are well known (and commemorated by the Boston Marathon), but who has heard of the battle of Sullivan’s Island?

I spent every summer of my youth on Sullivan’s Island, and the event was drilled into me.

In late May of 1776 the British decided to capture the city of Charleston (the largest port in the South, the fourth largest city in the colonies, and capital of the richest province). To this end they dispatched a fleet of 20 ships which was to land an army and take the city.

Sullivan’s Island is right outside Charleston harbor. There was a half-built fort on the island. This was all the protection the city had. The fort had only 26 guns, and enough ammunition for each gun to be fired 28 times. The fleet had ten times as many guns (262) and no dearth of powder. There were ~400 men in the fort and another 700 on the Island entrenched to prevent a force of 2900 British marines from landing.

Somehow the British did not understand the local tides. Three of their ships ran aground, and their battle plan (which depended on being able to sail behind the Island into shallow water) failed completely. Their attempt to land a ground force to take the fort from behind also failed, again due to lack of understanding of local currents. They suffered heavy casualties, and were forced to destroy one of their own ships before they withdrew.

Six days later the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Sadly, the 28th of June is no time to run a marathon in Charleston. I expect that is why this epic battle is practically unknown.

But — how far is that?

Rusty had us run by time today. Not by distance. He didn’t really give us a pace either. “Start out with 95 second quarters, and then run what feels right.” Hmm. We were to run for two minutes and then jog for a minute and then repeat — 10 times total. To add a soupçon of additional confusion we were to run in the outside lanes so we didn’t know how long each lap actually was.

And was the 95 second quarter pace for the inside lane? or the outside? Rusty didn’t clarify

Presumably because it didn’t matter, we were to find our own pace. Practice for those races without mile markers

I found it very odd. At one point, about a minute and a half into the two minute hard run, I found myself speeding up, thinking I’d get there sooner (and so get it over with sooner) if I just ran faster. But it didn’t matter how fast I ran, two minutes was two minutes — there was no “there” to get to.

Another point when I lapped some people for the second time, I was feeling very smug: “I’ll be finished long before they will be,” I thought to myself. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how silly that was. We’d all finish at the same time, when 30 minutes were up. I might go further, but I’d finish no sooner.

Somehow my brain is so used to thinking of running a distance that it is very hard to grasp the implications of running a time.

And that was why Rusty chose this workout — to mix us up a little and stop us being complacent.

It used to be common to have “1 hour” races, where the goal was to see how far you could go in the time rather than to reach a specific finish line. I’ve never done one. I think it would be weird. I’d like to try it — would it feel like a race? Would I get the adreneline boost a race gives me?

I suppose it would have to be on a track. Ug. Running roughly 40 times around a track sounds dull. And confusing — who would be counting each person. Perhaps that’s why they’ve fallen out of favor — the logistics of counting make it impossible for a large field to race.

Still, it would be odd.

Irony

I don’t like running the 4th of July race. It is too hot. Or on those times when it is foggy, it is too hot and too humid.

It’s probably not really that hot — not to a walker anyway — but to a runner — the sun beats down and there is no shade on the bike path.

I decided I was going to volunteer.

Then about 3 weeks ago my left knee started hurting. Who knows why, my knees have minds of their own and do the strangest things. So now I have a perfect excuse for not running the 15k.

And now I want to.

Mile Markers? Who cares?

I was just talking to José. People have been giving him (and I presume Wally too) a hard time about the lack of mile markers.

While it was a shock not to have them, I don’t think their absence was a significant issue. At least not for me. In some ways it might have been a plus.

Looking at my time at the Los Olivos chip mat, (and guessing a distance of ~5.7 miles) I see I was running rather slowly on that initial uphill part — roughly 6:30s. If I had tried to run that at 6:20s or 6:15s as I had planned I might have been completely burned out by the time I got to the part where I could run fast. Instead I ran what felt right, and it seems to have been right.

I had a great race, and would like to say, as publicly as I can, that I don’t really care about the mile markers. Their absence makes for a better story

So thank you Wally and José for all your work, it was a great course.

One hundred years of 26.2

The 2008 Olympics marks the hundredth anniversary of the peculiar choice of 26.2miles for the marathon.

It’s rather interesting how that distance was chosen, I’d like to tell you about it. Are you all sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

The Greek Olympic games started in 776BCE and lasted until 393CE. As with the modern games they were held every 4 years.

The games were not open to women (who weren’t even allowed to watch), but there was a similar set of athletic contests for unmarried women.

There was no marathon race. There were really only four footraces, though the specifics varied over the centuries: a 1 stade sprint which went from one end of the stadium to the other (~192m), a diaulos sprint (2 stade, ~380m, where the runners went back and forth turning at a post), a long distance race, dolichos, which was anywhere from 7 to 24 stade (1.3km~4.6km), and finally a 2~4 stade run in full armor (which weighed about 50 lb).

The Roman Emperor Theodosius forbade pagan cults in 393CE and thus ended the games of antiquity. [†]

Heroditus tells us that when the Persians invaded Greece in 490BCE, the Athenians sent the runner Pheidippides to Sparta to request aid (~150miles), later, when the battle was won, a runner ran from the battle site at Marathon to Athens to report the good news (this runner is often said to be Pheidippides though Heroditus does not name him).

The Olympic games were revived in 1896; with the first one held in Athens to honor the ancient tradition. The organizers decided to finish the games with a long distance race from Marathon to Athens, a distance of about 40km (roughly 25 miles), the race was won with a time of 2:58. This was the first marathon.

The first Boston marathon was on 19 April 1897, the course was 24.5miles long (a little shorter than the Olympic distance) and 15 people ran it. This race was won with a 2:55 time. [†]

The marathon was not a set distance in the early years, it was roughly 40km, but each course was different.

In 1908 the Olympics were held in London, the race was originally designed to be ~25 miles long. It started near Windsor castle and ended at the Stadium in Shepherd’s Bush. The Princess of Wales requested that the start of the race be moved so that her children could watch. This added a mile to the course. Then Queen Alexandria wanted the end of the race moved so that she would get the best view of it. This added 385 yards to the course. (I think I would have been quite annoyed to discover that the race I intended to run was 5% longer than I expected, ah well, one of the last instances of the use of the royal prerogative I presume).

The winner of the 1908 marathon was not the first to cross the finish line. Dorando PIETRI entered the stadium first, but was so disoriented he ran the wrong way around the track; the umpires redirected him, but then he fell, and fell 3 or 4 more times and had to be helped. He finished with a time of 2:54:46 (where the last 385 yards took ~10 minutes), John Hayes won with a time of 2:55:18 (Dorando was disqualified because he needed help to finish). [†]

After the London Olympics, the Polytechnic Harriers of London created the Polytechnic Marathon (in London), it was the next marathon to chose 26miles 385yards as its standard distance. It was run annually in from 1909 until 1996. The first running was on 26 May 1909 and the winning time was 2:42:31. [†]

In 1912 the Olympic marathon distance was 40.2km (24.98miles), in 1920 it was 42.75km (26.56miles). (in 1916 there were no Olympics because of World War I)

In 1924 the Olympic distance was standardized to the 1908 distance [†]. Boston changed its course that year, but the new distance was still too short, and Boston was not the standard distance until 1927. [†]

Women were first (officially) allowed to run Boston in 1972 (3:10:26)[†], in the Polytechnic in 1978 (2:54:11)[†], while the first Olympic woman’s marathon was Los Angeles in 1984 (2:24:52).[†]

Boston started requiring qualifying times in 1970. At first the requirement was that all runners be able to run faster than 4 hours. At some later point an age-graded system was put in place. In 2002 the age-graded system was amended to make it attract more older runners (the qualifying times for runners 45years+ were increased). [†]

Google?

Some time ago I got an email from a recruiter at google asking me to send a resumé. That was rather flattering. I checked with some computer friends and found that some of them had also received this request — I guess the recruiter did a web search for likely people working on open source projects — or something.

Less flattering.

A couple of months later, after I’d mostly forgotten the original event, I got another email asking if I would set up a phone interview to apply for a job in internationalization.

I don’t know much about internationalization. Come to think of it, I’m not sure that any of my skills would be useful to google. I know nothing about searching, databases, etc. I know the HTT protocol and can frame a request, but doubtless google solved that problem years ago.

I tried to explain this to them, and that I didn’t really want to leave SB. Still it might prove interesting, I’ve made font-editors for 10 years now, perhaps it is time for a change. If a gift job drops in my lap I should at least look it in the mouth, so I gave them a time to call me.

I went through the phone interview. Rather liked the process. The guy interviewing me (an engineer, not a PR drone) asked good questions about what I’d done, and then posed a computer problem for me to solve that proved interesting. At the end he asked if I had any questions.

Well, yes, I had a couple. Most important: What, specifically, was the job? To my amazement, he could not tell me. To me this was an extremely important question. Why should I leave my current work, which I rather enjoy (even if it doesn’t pay) to go do something I don’t think I’m even qualified for? I wanted to say “Convince me that what you are offering me is interesting and worthwhile.” But he couldn’t.

Second question: The job was said to be located in either Zürich or Mountain View, Ca. I don’t speak German (and I gather zürichdeutsch is vastly different from the smattering of German I’ve picked up) any chance the job could be in Geneva (I do speak reasonable French)? The guy I was talking to didn’t seem to think so. Well could I telecommute from Santa Barbara? “Oh,” he said, “We have an office in Irvine, I’m sure you could work there instead.” That’s certainly consoling.

Two weeks later I had another phone interview. Similar procedure. Again the guy I spoke to couldn’t tell me what the job would entail. He told me what he was doing, which sounded quite dull, and said it might be something like that. Eventually he asked me what I would like to do.

This seemed to me the wrong question. I was already doing what I would like to do. I didn’t ask for a job at google, they contacted me. It’s up to them to come up with something interesting if they want to attract me.

Then I did get a call from a PR person who wanted to talk to me about “Google’s interview process.” I wasn’t in the least interested in the interview process. I was slightly annoyed with them too. There was a certain arrogance about them, as if they were doing me a favor in talking to me. Every email I got from them had the title “Google!”, with an exclamation point, as though it were the most amazing thing ever.

But they had said almost nothing which I found interesting. They had given me no reason to work for them.

None-the-less I phoned back. They had twigged to the fact that I wasn’t very interested. And I was told that I’d have to move to Mountain View if I wanted to work for them. I thought I’d made it clear from the start that I didn’t want to do that. I guess not.

The woman said she’d make my resumé inactive.

I keep coming back to the fact that they approached me, yet acted as though I were petitioning them. I can’t understand why they made no effort to convince me that working for them would be better than doing what I currently do. Actually, I find it rather insulting.

An acquaintance who works at google said “You must understand that yours was a special situation and you must make allowances.” Wrong. The “special situation” was caused by google, so they must make the allowances. And since several of my friends have been in the same “special situation”, I do wonder just how “special” it is?

Yoga

Today is the new moon.

The Ashtangis will not practice yoga today because the new moon pulls us downward.  On the other hand the full moon pulls us upward.

When my yoga teacher said this, I had to object. At nine in the morning (as it then was), the new moon was well above above the horizon, somewhere near the sun in fact. The new moon pulls us upward during the day time. The full moon, on the other hand is below the horizon during the day and pulls us down. Not only that but the new moon is right near the sun, so the pull of both combines, whereas when the full the moon and the sun pull in opposite directions. The upshot being that we get a stronger upward pull during the new moon than at any other time. Exactly the opposite of what she said.

My teacher tried to talk about tides and fluids, which is completely irrelevant to whether the moon is pulling up or not. Eventually she settled on prana. Which might mean breath, and might mean spirit (yes, I know that spirit used to have the same double meaning). Well, the air molecules in my breath are moving so fast from ambient  heat that the pull of the moon exherts such a slight force that it will not be observable. And anyway it will still be upward during the day at the new moon.

As for my spirit… Personally I’m feeling fairly up-beat. My injury is fading, it isn’t raining, I’m more cheerful than I’ve been in a month. The moon is totally invisible today, but then I don’t see the moon most days. Why is it’s invisibility supposed to affect me?

To me, it just sounds like a lie.

Yoga comes with this huge superstructure of completely made up concepts with, as far as I can tell, no reality outside the imaginations of yogis. What are the nadhis? Can you dissect a body and find a chakra? No.

The night before last a different yoga teacher informed us that our problems are rooted inside ourselves, and if we can transform ourselves we can solve our problems. I could not help wondering what self-transformation could solve global warming.

I love yoga poses. I love striving to find the perfect instantiation of each pose in each moment. I love moving. But I hate the philosophy that comes with it.

The twenty-ninth day

When I was in college the text book for my class on population dynamics began with the riddle:

A man has a lily pond in his garden which keeps getting more lily pads in it. Every day the number of pads doubles. The man knows from experience that in 30 days the pond will be full of pads, and he doesn’t like that so he trims it before it gets to that point, say when it gets about half full. So when will it be half full?

The answer, of course, is on the twenty-ninth day. In that last day the pond will increase by as much as it has increased in all days before that.

Our minds do not intuitively accept the dynamics of geometric growth. Somehow it seems reasonable that the pond should be half full on the fifteenth day. We intuitively feel that we will have plenty of time to deal with problems posed by population growth — because, well, we’ve been increasing our population for hundreds of thousands of years, surely we’ll have another hundred thousand or so before things get critical.

But that isn’t the way geometric increase works.

The sad thing about population crashes is that up to the last minute the culture appears to be flourishing. The population will be highest, and the ability to achieve results at its greatest right before the collapse. This is true for fruitflies in a glass bottle. It was true for humans on Easter Island.¹ It is almost certainly true for us now.

There are several ways a population can exceed the carrying capacity of an ecosystem. It can consume more resources than the ecosystem can supply, or it can produce more waste than the ecosystem can dispose of.

Around 1900 farmers were getting worried because the need for organic fertilizer was outstripping the supply. The invention of artificial fertilizer solved this problem — but the artificial fertilizers we make are based on non-renewable resources, and eventually we will run out. In a sense the global human population exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity about 100 years ago. We’ve been living on borrowed time since.

In 1858 the Great Stink almost closed Parlement, and forced London to stop dumping sewage into the Thames, and instead to pipe it into the estuary and the Atlantic Ocean. When our waste overcame the carrying capacity of the area, the solution was to dump it further afield.

As time progresses we find more resources that we absolutely need, and more wastes that we generate. As our population increases we touch more areas of the planet and there is no longer a safe place to dump our waste. Food remains a danger, especially as we now divert food production to biofuels. Energy has become a need, and the growing scarcity of oil is shown in the recent cost increases (and concomitant increases in the price of food as we try to grow more oil — to my mind a silly attempt that will do almost nothing for providing energy while destabilizing nations).

Our plastic throw-aways are destroying boobies on remote islands where man has barely set foot. Mercury is disrupting the ocean food chains. DDT has send many species to the brink of extinction. And we are slowly coming to see just how dangerous global warming will prove.

If there were only 1 billion of us, trying to live with technology of 1900 — and we didn’t increase that — we might survive. If there were only 50 million of us trying to drive modern cars we might survive.

But the horror of geometric increase is that it isn’t clear that there is a problem until it is far too late to do anything about it.

Then after the last day, when things really are unraveling, history suggests we will go to war over the last crumbs of resources, and by our own hands worsen the crisis we have imposed on ourselves.

We just are not willing, any of us, to reduce our consumption, nor to reduce our baby production, nor to commit suicide. Keeping the economy growing is the watchword of politics; even knowledge of contraception is considered immoral by far too many of us, and suicide is a sin.

We don’t know how quickly the damage we have done will destroy us. But there are so many ways we have damaged the world. And we aren’t addressing any of them effectively. Perhaps, as Kornell suggests, only Alaska will be habitable by 2100, or maybe 2050, or maybe 2150. Who knows when.

But soon.

And unavoidably something will collapse.

(I don’t see much point in voting tomorrow; I will, but nothing important can change)

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¹See Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed