Double Blind

I’ve been taking it a little slower on the training over the past couple of weeks. Maybe I’m worried that I’ll get injured even though I don’t have any good reason to believe so other than the occasional blister on the foot. So over the past 10 days I’ve had 3 training sessions, each consisting of 40 minutes of running in various configurations. The last 40 minute run had me going 6.7 kilometers, which is barely enough to get me past the 60 minute mark for a full 10km. The last training run will be on Thursday and then I will give it a three day break for race day.

My target will be the following: Finish the race in 60 minutes or better.

My secondary target will be the following: Finish the race better than 50th percentile in my age group.

I’ll have to look into a proper exercise regimen after the race is over. Presumably this will be some sort of combination between running, cycling, swimming and hiking, but it will have to be regular and probably two or three times a week.

On a complete side note, one of the thoughts that went through my head when I did my last training cycle was the following:

If I was somebody from the year 1806 that was magically transported two hundred years into the future and I saw the world through my own eyes while out running for 40 minutes, what would I find fascinating as I observed the world?

I’m sure there are many more things that would be fascinating from the context of 200 years ago just on a routine jog. Thinking of this sort of stuff while running makes it a bit more interesting.

I’ve had my cell phone (a simple Virgin Mobile Nokia model with no fancy features) since last September and I’m quite happy with how it turned out. Since then I have used $80 of airtime ($60 of which I explicitly paid for), the majority of which was used for the election. So far that has worked out to approximately $11/month which is nearly 3 times better than I could have done with any other normal monthly package. Over time I expect that number to actually decrease as my run-rate after the election was about 5 bucks a month. The cheapest thing I could find over at Fido would have cost $35.45/month if you wanted voice mail and call display, not to mention that you had to sign up for a 2-year contract.

I particularly like the fact that you can switch to a pricing regime which suits the amount of activity that you plan on using your phone with. Since I don’t use the phone too much, I use the basic 25 cents per minute system, but back during October and November for the election I switched to the 10 cents per minute (which cost 40 cents per day) and that reduced net costs considerably (break-even would be greater than 2 minutes a day).

The free voice mail and caller display help extremely. I usually bump anybody I don’t recognize (which more often than not turned out to be wrong numbers, perhaps people looking for meth) to voice mail – if it’s that important than they usually leave a message. This way the phone also acts as a glorified pager for the cost of $45/year which I find to be very reasonable.

This only works because I don’t use my phone very often – I estimate I would have to use about 200 minutes a month airtime before I’d have to seriously start shopping around for a monthly package. I’m not remotely close to that right now. My requirements may shift in the future, but right now I’m rather pleased with the solution since it works and is cheap. I wonder if Virgin will try to screw it up for customers like me by jacking up rates or reducing the maximum time before you have to top up the phone balance.

Last Saturday, I ran 6.9km in 40.5 minutes. The schedule had originally been to run 50 minutes straight, but I ran out of time and had to be somewhere else for another occasion.

Today, I bought a new pair of shoes and some socks that had considerably less cotton content (40%) and did 3x10minute runs, spaced with one minute of walking. After 32 minutes (30 minutes running and 2 minutes walking), I covered 5.55 kilometers, according to Google Earth. Both these times were consistent with finishing off 10km in 58 minutes.

The new shoes worked well. Instead of a pair of cross-trainers, these ones are genuine runners with the cushioning below. The socks and shoes in conjunction seemed to avoid blistering in my previous sensitive spots on my toes, so I’m happy about that. We’ll see if it can keep up in future runs.

This guy is nuts, but keep in mind that all truly unique inventions sound crazy until the inventors can prove us all wrong. I’m all for the experiment, give him the funding!

Most good ideas that have been brought into the world started with people that clearly don’t think along the mainstream. That’s how you get progress.

Of course, for every brilliant guy that has a legitimate insight on time travel, you get a thousand whackos like John Titor (who I must admit was an entertaining whacko) that completely give the subject a bad name, kind of like Cold Fusion. The only problem is it’s nearly impossible to tell the crackpots from the legitimate researchers.

This article from the Guardian, The strange case of the man who took 40,000 ecstasy pills in nine years, is rather interesting.

Keep in mind as I write this that I’m not a pharmacist, so I don’t endorse this behaviour!

40,000 pills in 9 years translates into slightly more than 12 pills a day. It’s impressive the guy kept a journal of the rate of his consumption, but assuming the number is accurate, you’re looking at 12 pills a day. Now, I don’t know much about the pharmacological properties of a typical ecstasy pill, but is there anything off the shelf you can buy at a drug store where you can take 12 pills a day for nine years and still survive with just having some memory loss?

If you took antihistamines or even Vitamin C pills at the rate of 12 a day, I’m sure you’d begin to feel the consequences of it after day 1, let alone after nine years.

One of the drugs that I do know a lot about, caffeine, gets sold in packets which contain 100mg pills. I’ve never taken them before, but I know that 100mg is typically the amount of caffeine you’d see in a medium cup of coffee. So if you took 1200mg of caffeine for 9 years straight, do you think you would be feeling straight?

Somehow I think this article is an endorsement for the drug’s safety more than the consequences of taking ecstasy. Either that, or this guy was so delusional that he never took 12 pills a day or he was being sold sugar tablets most of the time.

Here is a reply to Declan’s comments on a previous post about Climate Change. My reply, once again, was a little long winded so I separated it into this post. FYI, Declan writes on his own excellent weblog at Crawl Across the Ocean.

Some choice quotations:

The money raised via a carbon tax doesn’t disappear, it just gets redistributed through the economy. To the extent that the carbon tax accurately reflects the discounted cost to society from global warming, the net effect should not be any kind of negative impact on growth, just a redirection of resources away from more carbon intensive sources/uses of energy in favour of less carbon intensive ones.

The money raised by income taxes doesn’t disappear either, it just gets redistributed through the economy. But the real question is how quickly the money circulates around the economy – the more circulation, the stronger the economy. Since energy products are quite inelastic with respect to price, people will probably still grit their teeth and pay up. But the money that was destined for other purchases gets taken out of circulation for the government to spend, which slows down the economy.

Another gross simplification is to think about the following: Let’s say I lend you $20. You hand over $20 to me, and I go spend it on some fruit and dark chocolate and eat it. You then come back to me and say “OK, I’d like to call your debt” and I say “They money is all still inside the economy, what difference does it make?”

In the absence of a carbon tax, continued increases in the price of oil and gas are likely to lead us back to coal. You suggest we pursue alternative forms of energy but a carbon tax would encourage exactly that.

Perhaps coal, perhaps nuclear, or perhaps the cheapest available “alternative” energy source. I agree that a carbon tax will help encourage the development of alternative sources of energy, but for the wrong reason. It’s also not a mutually exclusive decision whether to use fossil fuels or alternative energy, we just choose fossil fuels because it’s cheap and convenient. But when alternative energy is cheap and convenient (e.g. in the Pacific Northwest there are dams all over the place), it works too.

I think you are severely underestimating the cost of adapting to a new warmer climate, and your final paragraph is predicated on an assumption that the final shape of the climate wil be the same regardless of what we do, but that’s not my understanding of the situation.

I have no idea what the environmental liabilities of greenhouse emissions are. In fact, I don’t even know if the balance of changes would be an asset or liability. If you’re some evergreen tree in a forest, you’re probably loving the fact that your CO2 source is increasing, but hating the fact that higher temperatures cause more clouds, reducing your chlorophyll utilization rates from less sunlight. Just like when anything changes, there will be winners and losers, but the survivors will always be the ones to adapt to changing circumstances. I’ve always had a hunch that Canada would stand to gain big time in the event of global warming, but talking about the benefits of planetary warming is political taboo, so I haven’t bothered to write about it yet.

Yes, it’s tragic to see polar bears drown on thinning ice shelves, but who says this hasn’t happened millions of years ago? What solid evidence do we have to show that the climate circa 1850 was the “perfect” climate for the planet? Why not cool down the earth instead?

Aside from that, your argument that Canada shouldn’t do anything because we are a small country doesn’t make any sense to me. If you lived in the U.S. would you be arguing in reverse?

If I was the USA, I wouldn’t be complying with Kyoto either simply because other countries have too much of an incentive to cheat by forcing the USA to buy carbon credits derived from less than credible certification processes. It’s also a tough sell when you see India and China go through the version of their own industrial revolutions and realize that you’d be playing with both arms behind your back globally if you actually had to cut your carbon emissions to less than 1990 levels. It’s the tragedy of the commons on a global scale. It would greatly help if there was some very, very good evidence that definitively links temperatures to greenhouse activity, but there isn’t a smoking gun like the ozone hole or acid rain, so I guess what I’m trying to say is “brace for impact”.

On a total side note, if things got really bad on earth (i.e. the average temperature rose 10 degrees and it was quite obvious that the oceans would boil in another 100 years if we didn’t do anything), I do believe at present we have the technology to send solar reflectors into orbit and reduce solar exposure on earth. It would be expensive, but not prohibitively so. I recall the Russians thinking of turning satellite reflectors ONTO the earth at nighttime in Siberia to increase the growing season. I’m not sure whether this was actually feasible, but it was a cool article when I read it.

This post is ruthlessly pragmatic in view, politically it would be suicide to mention it in any conference on climate change! I’d probably get lynched on the stage. I’ve never been one to avoid confrontation, however.

Today’s run was 40 minutes of running, one minute of walking, and then 20 minutes of running. I decided, once again, to run along the dyke in Richmond late in the afternoon. The rain had stopped and it was partly cloudy outside. Unlike my other ventures on the dyke, it wasn’t windy at all, which made for a pleasant run since the sunset was nearly picture-perfect.

The run went very well, and I had consciously decided to “take it easy” from the very beginning since 40 minutes of running was a long time. I think this will be the optimal strategy during the actual run itself. After running, I Google Earthed my path and I ran 5.24km in 30 minutes, and the other 31 minutes of running (and one minute of walking) I ran 4.51km. Considering at no point during the run I was out of breath, I figure I can step it up a little during the actual race and try to beat the 60 minute mark.

I had originally started this post as a reply to a comment that Declan made in a previous post of mine, but it got long winded so I decided to post it here instead.

Explains why a carbon tax is probably the best approach to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.

I would disagree with that statement. Let’s say hypothetically speaking you slapped a $10/litre tax on fuel. Ignoring socio-political consequences (and the development of a huge black market), the resulting recession would be unimaginably bad and the goal of reducing Canadian greenhouse gas emissions would be successful. The net effect around the world would be negligible.

That’s the problem with most plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – they’ll work, but they’ll work only because they’d cripple (or in a less severe case than $10/litre, slow) the economy. There are other ways to cripple an economy other than imposing carbon taxes that would still achieve the same effect as reducing carbon emissions. You can raise business taxes to some intolerable level and this will result in the reduction of greenhouse emissions since nobody will want to produce anything in this country. You can also do something like banning all exports out of the country.

An economy’s strength is directly proportional to the amount of energy it consumes – never in the history of a civilization has economic strengthening been parallelled by a decrease in energy consumption. Most plans to reduce greenhouse emissions have to do with punishing consumption, either through direct taxation or indirect taxation (e.g. increasing product costs through environmental regulation).

The price of oil has gone up nearly 4-fold over the past five years and oil consumption is still increasing by about 2% per year. Is there a limit to the price of oil before this gets affected? Probably, but it’s best to let markets decide that instead of slapping on arbitrary taxes on carbon that will do absolutely nothing to solve the issues at hand – if anything, carbon taxes will just delay the inevitable.

One absurdity of compliance with Canada’s involvement in the Kyoto protocol is that if we got rid of every plane, train and automobile in the country, we would still not be able to comply with the treaty. If you look at the inventory of Canada’s greenhouse emissions (the last one was published in 2003), you will see that the source of carbon emissions is very distributed in the country. Even if you were to convert all fossil-fuel burning power plants into nuclear, you would not be able to comply with Kyoto.

I have no doubts that a heavy carbon tax would be able to get the number down below the 1990 levels, but at considerable expense for no real benefit other than to say that “we did it”. It wouldn’t make a dent in the global scene and the trade-off is simply not worth it.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be looking for alternative ways of providing useful energy – the development of geothermal taps, efficient solar power cells, wind turbines, etc., will all have an incremental effect of generating power. The reality of the situation, however, is that there will be nothing to stop people from using oil simply because it is most convenient source of energy at hand, for reasons of cost, energy density, portability and established infrastructure.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t proposed any solutions in this post, it’s because I don’t believe that any viable solutions exist at present that will enable us to sustain our present way of life. Really, the only hope for people that don’t like to see greenhouse emissions is that all the oil gets mined out of the earth and gradually gets so expensive that we’re forced to use other non-greenhouse generating energy sources. The other thing people can pray for is the development of sustainable fusion, but current odds suggest that we’re more likely to see SETI confirm alien signals from outer space than being able to use terrestrial fusion as a primary source of energy.

Note that this post has completely ignored the environmental consequences of greenhouse gases. That’s another topic completely, although I’ve concluded that the optimal strategy here is to adapt to whatever the climate changes into, rather than staging an expensive futile attempt to prevent it from happening.

I receive an SMS message on my cell phone at 2:04am, directly sent to my phone not through the SMS gateway I have on this website:

DO U HAUE ANY JIB I CAN BUY PLS – SUSAN?

Now, the only definition I know of “Jib” is the triangular sail on the front of a sailboat, so I knew something else was going on. Looking it up on the urban dictionary, it’s slang for methamphetamine, aka Crystal Meth.

The phone number was 604-376-xxxx, which traces to a Rogers customer originating from New Westminster (should anybody be surprised at this?).

Unfortunately for Susan, I’m not a drug dealer. I wonder if SMS messages are the most frequent form of communication to get in touch with your local drug dealer? I remember back in the days when pagers were just coming onto the market, there was a perception that if you weren’t a doctor or lawyer and owned a pager, you were using it for the purposes of pushing narcotics, especially if you were under the age of 20.

I somehow doubt I will be getting more unsolicited requests for meth anytime in the future.