10.29.03

My Head Is Mud

Lately I've been having trouble concentrating for more than a few minutes at a time on anything. It feels like someone turned the dimmer switch down on my mind, and I can't seem to think clearly or sustain focus and attention. It's baffling and troubling, since it's been several weeks now that I have felt so murky. If it goes on much longer, I will have to change the Idle Words mascot to a catfish.

I've got to stop eating those paint chips.

10.28.03

Calling Edward Tufte

The fires in California are generating big demand for geodata - people want to know what's burning, what's at risk, and where the fire is heading next. Ten years ago, that information would only have been available by radio or television.

Those of you who consider government inherently wasteful might note that the same public agencies that are actually fighting the fires are also providing superb, detailed maps and satellite imagery of the areas affected, updated in near real-time.

Of course, there is also a dark side - infographics so horrible that they make you want to root for the fire, just to see the server hosting them go up in flames.

Cheers to Andy Baio, who found that particular abomination on the UCLA Daily Bruin website.

10.28.03

Non-Parisians, Please Ignore

Frank Black is playing a show at the Bataclan in Paris on the 29th of November. If you're a lover of fine music living near Paris (or if you're devastated that the previous night's Alain Bashung concert is sold out) get yourself a ticket for the show. Special bonus: you can take me home to sleep on your sofa.

10.28.03

Even Aerospace Engineers Get The Blues

Anil has a great thread on fear of flying today. I particularly like some of the comments:

I don't know, Anil. I'm an aerospace engineer by education, and every time I board an aircraft, I'm reminded of two things:

1. I know how many things could cause us to take that terrifying, fiery plunge.

2. Some of the idiots I went to class with are designing these birds.

I agree with Anil that information and experience both help make flying less scary, especially for novice or infrequent flyers. Knowing that a plane is supposed to throttle back soon after takeoff, or that the landing gear will make a loud noise when it drops, can only help. Still, in the end, it comes down to luck. Some people are wired so that heights, or random translations in the x, y and z direction, cause freakout. I got the short straw in that lottery.

Now, if only traveling between cities involved completely smooth flights during which vipers dropped from the overhead bins at unpredictable intervals, I would be home free.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. We're gotten reports of some occasional constrictors up ahead, so please buckle up, put away your tray table, and put on the protective helmet. Should be through it in about 20 minutes. Hope you enjoy the rest of the flight."

10.24.03

Shake Me, Don't Break Me

After my latest zero-courage encounter with turbulence (Embraer jet, final approach to Manchester, clutched head of passenger in front of me), I thought I would read up a little bit on turbulence, and either find out something useful, or at the very least get some of that old-time condescending air safety reassurance. "There's no need to worry about the wings snapping off, ignorant fool", or "No passenger has ever died from turbulence".

But of course, the great thing about turbulence is that no man knows the day or the hour, it's killed plenty of passengers, and it certainly can snap the wings off a plane if you fly in the right kind of weather, or just run out of luck.

Nevertheless, the sight of a 23-year-old flight attendant blithely pouring hot coffee while I prepare for imminent death suggests that I'm a big old wuss.

If you're as terrified of the old shooka-shooka as I am (or if you're like Chocolate and Vodka, and consider deadly, terrifying turbulence to be a source of cheap thrills) you might be interested in this thread on where to find the worst turbulence on Earth.

There's an understandable amount of debate there about what 'worst' means, and where you are likely to find it, but it's safe to say that you would not want to sit next to me on a mid-July flight from Denver to Australia, overflying Mt. Fuji and the Bay of Bengal.

You also wouldn't want to choose that flight to get naked in the restroom, whether alone or with that special someone.

Turbulence, like herpes, comes in several unpleasant variants. Some of them (thunderstorms, wake vortices) are predictable and avoidable, others (mountain waves, the mess over northern Japan) are predictable and unavoidable, and a small, nasty set strike from out of the blue. So I was excited to find that the NOAA had developed a forecast site for clear-air turbulence, that notorious spiller of drinks, which arrives with no warning and can seriously injure people who aren't buckled in (i.e., flight attendants). You may want to check the site before your next flight, so you can ration your fear accordingly.

On the other side of the helpfulness spectrum, there is the U.S. News turbulence primer, featuring the world's most useless online animation, only partially made up for by the dour black sidebar of scary statistics.

Of course, the 'worst turbulence on Earth' isn't found in Denver or over Japan; it lives inside hurricanes, and there are people whose job it is to fly through them:

The planes do suffer damage in some of the worst hurricanes, and over the years three have been lost with all hands. Their crews are courageous; they have no chance of bailing out if the plane gets into trouble. In hurricane conditions a parachute would go up, not down and anyway nobody could survive in that sea and no rescue boat would have a hope of reaching them.

There's even a first-person account by a USA Today reporter reckless enough to fly in one of these planes through Hurricane Fran.

To me it sounds like the Priceline flight from hell. "Your $40 bid for a round trip to the Carribean was accepted! However, we are routing you through Hurricane Juan. Please note this ticket is not refundable."

10.23.03

The Mystery of Vertical Food

I spent much of my last day in Halifax doing a training run, a big lap around the city. I made a special point of going over the lovely MacDonald bridge, a 1/2 mile span connecting Halifax to Dartmouth, not realizing that it was cursed. Those pesky Micmac.

Running may be dorky, but I've found that it motivates me to get out of the hotel and learn some basic facts about a city. Since we have no TV reception at home, I have to fight the temptation to stay in the hotel room watching televised snooker or hippopotamus documentaries, both of which filled a happy evening for me in Halifax. But the thought of beating P. Diddy in the marathon is enough to get me out on the open road.

When I got near Point Pleasant park on my run, down at the south tip of Halifax, I noticed there were more and more cars in the roadway. Soon I was passing stopped traffic, and the sidewalk began to grow thick with pedestrians. Everyone was heading towards the park. "Wow," I thought to myself, "People here sure like their Sunday walk".

By the time I reached the park fence, there were so many people and cars that it was hard to even get through the crowd. It was a beautiful, fall day, and everyone was bundled up except for the idiot American in running shorts. Many people were pushing strollers or tugging along tiny bundled-up Nova Scotians they had made the year before. All told, I could see upwards of a thousand people making their way down to the park entrance at the bottom of the hill.

The park itself, when I finally made it to the entrance, was a sight to behold. In between upturned trees, the park paths were completely jammed with people, all of them there to see the hurricane damage. There was a beatiful, strange smell in the air - a kind of fermented pine scent, as if a tanker full of retsina had run aground in the harbor.

The mystery was easy to clear up - half the parking lot was covered in a small mountain range of wood chips, over fifteen feet high. Clearly someone had spent a long weekend with a crane and a wood chipper, clearing fallen wood from the paths in the park. Steam was coming off of the summits, as microflora deep inside ate their way through the pile, turning cellulose into alcohol.

I had no hope of making it into the park at a walk, let alone trying to continue my run there. So instead, I weaved along a frontage road leading back downtown, passing old factories and moored ocean liners, the kind of post-industrial lanscape I was always crazy for as a painter. It just means I'll have to go back to Halifax, and bring along the easel. I'm so used to port districts being completely fenced off that it hadn't even occured to me the area might be accessible. But it was, and in the late afternoon light, it was gorgeous.

I wanted to walk back to Point Pleasant Park after finishing my run, but police had blocked it off by the time I got there. Rubberneckers like me were still streaming in from every direction, and apparently there were so many thousands of visitors in the park that it was posing a threat to public safety.

Barred from the park, I consoled myself by having a late supper at a restaurant called the Five Fishermen. Internet foodie sites will tell you that this is a seafood paradise, or that it sucks, or all kinds of things in between. I had been there many years ago, on a pre-college vacation with my mother, and wanted to see if they still served one particular dish: you got brought a plate of raw seafood and vegetables, and a really hot granite slab on a ceramic tray. You then cooked and assembled your own meal right there at the table - an engineer's paradise, and a nice way to eat delicate seafood.

There was no more granite slab, but the Five Fishermen did still have the world's best steamed mussels. These were available at a special buffet station manned by a waitress, presumably to prevent people like me from eating the place bankrupt. She greeted me with a smile at my first portion, looked vaguely amused when I came back for seconds, and then just started looking horrified as I tore through plate after plate of the things.

The main dish (halibut) I ordered was also excellent, but I was a little taken aback to have it served to me in the form of a tower. That is, the meal was larger in the vertical dimension than it was long or wide. It was like a Jenga set of fish and vegetables, with a round lobster ravioli balanced on the very summit.

This kind of configuration seems to be all the rage at socially climbing restaurants of a certain type, the kind that don't have laminated menus and refuse to serve fried potatoes in any form. But its significance, origin, and acceptable consumption strategies are a mystery to me. Who started this strange vertical arms race? Who was the first to complain that their steak was too planar?

10.21.03

Idle Words 2003 European Tour

Visa and MasterCard are proud to announce the official 2003 Idle Words tour of Western Europe, coming this November to a city near you:

• 19 - Reykjavik
• 20 - Amsterdam
• 22 - Utrecht
• 23 - The Hague
• 24 - Haarlem
• 25 - Brussels
• 27 - Nice
• 29 - Paris
• 30 - Antwerp

If you live along this itinerary, here is your chance to say hello and drain the alcoholic beverage of your choice with one of America's northernmost bloggers.

Because let's face it - when are you ever coming to Vermont?

I'm on a mission to see old paintings (Belgium, Netherlands), and old friends (France). But it is always good to make new friends along the way. Send an email and I will be glad to meet you.

Extra special thanks to Marrije Schaake, who responded to my Ugly American request ("Holland - what can you tell me?") with the kind of avalanche of useful information that puts me to shame. I don't even know the street names in my own town, let alone where one can go to see some Old Masters.

The Netherlands - I can't wait!

10.20.03

The Bay of Fundy

Yesterday I drove north to the Bay of Fundy, the triangle of water that separates the western half of Nova Scotia from the mainland. As the sign proudly informs you when you get within fifty miles of the coast, this is the home of the highest tides on earth.

Tides turn out to be one of those things that grow more complicated the more you learn about them. Luckily, the reason for the extreme tides in the Bay of Fundy is pretty simple. The Wikipedia explains it:

The time it takes for a large wave to travel from the mouth of the bay to the opposite end, then reflect and travel back to the mouth of the bay, coincidentally matches the time from one high tide to the next. The result of this coincidence of timing is that that repeating wave is reinforced by the tidal rhythm, and consequently the world's highest tides are found in that bay.

Resonance, baby! Think Ella Fitzgerald breaking the wineglass, except that Ella is the Moon and the wineglass is a gorgeous triangular bay some fifty miles long.

A couple of sources also mention a 40:1 resonance between the Bay of Fundy and the larger Gulf of Maine system (bounded by the coast and the continental shelf), but I'm not sure what they're talking about.

The upshot is that fourteen cubic kilometers of water commute back and forth between the ocean and the inner bay, twice a day. This is so much water that its weight actually lifts and drops a part of Nova Scotia with it, by an infinitesimal amount.

I wanted to see a place called Cape Split, a west-facing spike of land at the mouth of the Minas Basin, where all of the moving tidal water has to squeeze through on its way in or out. In the hours between high and low tide, there is more water flowing here than through all of the rivers on the planet put together.

The drive up from Halifax is probably beautiful (I saw distant hints of mountains and sea through the sheets of rain), and the number of 'Scenic Overlook' road signs near Wolfville made me envious of people who have seen the bay under clearer skies. To me, it was a diffuse grey mist, with occasional bursts of autumn color peeking through. The hurricane had spent itself before getting this far north - the trees hadn't been stripped bare, and it was still full autumn.

Cape Split itself is a promontory of undeveloped land - there is road access, but the last bit requires a hike along an unmaintained forest footpath. An ominous sign at the trailhead reads:

Hikers are advised to wear hunter's orange between Sept. 15 and May 15.

Instead of safety orange, I was wearing a dark sweater and jeans, and the persistent rain meant that half of me was going to be covered in earth-tone mud. I might as well have been wearing artificial antlers. But there was no gunfire to be heard - always an encouraging sign - and I was feeling lucky.

The sign warned on:

Be advised the hike is four hours long - two there, two back.

Sure, I thought, four hours for an out-of-shape weekend hiker. But without a backpack weighing me down, how long could it take? After all, I'm at the absolute peak of my marathon training. Every muscle in my body is tuned for endurance and speed - I could probably run most of the trail, and slow down only to ford the really muddy parts. Who were these Canadian trail maintaners, to think they could intimidate me?

Four hours later, I emerged from the forest, drenched and exhausted and covered in mud. My hands were so cold that it took me ten minutes to work my car key out of my back pocket, and another five to get in the car and start the the heater working. Shades of Jack London. But I made it.

And the last part of the sign hadn't been an exaggeration:

Prepare to see one of the wonders of nature.

Cape Split is covered in pine forest until its very end, where the trail spits you out onto a giant turf-covered cliff. There are two smaller, inaccessible cliffs further on, and everywhere to the right is an expanse of roaring water, where the tide collides with itself, trying to make its twice-daily appointment with the moon. It is very, very beautiful there, even when your sweater has absorbed your body weight in water, and you know you have to spend the next two hours dodging buckshot in the mud.

10.18.03

Halifaxus Remotus

Now that the IEEE conference has ended, I have a chance to explore the beautiful city of Halifax.

Right, so maybe the IEEE conference was never a huge obstacle to begin with. But at least now I don't have to feel guilty about wandering the city. And thanks to fluke of airline pricing that made it cost less to stay two extra nights, I get to play the tourist.

Halifax is a small and very pretty city on the edge of a big natural harbor. It's built on a piece of land shaped something like the Suez penninsula - downtown is halfway up the Red Sea coast. In normal times, the most prominent thing about the city is the large citadel overlooking the city, as well as a pair of beautiful suspension bridges. Right now (not such a normal time) the most prominent thing about Halifax is the terrific number of downed trees.

Hurricane Juan roared through Nova Scotia just a few weeks ago, and now every major park in the city is closed, the paths blocked by fallen trees. My own ninth-floor window overlooks the block-sized Public Gardens, and out of forty trees there are five that are lying on their sides, torn out by the roots. Practically every tree in the city bears a bright scar of exposed wood from where it lost some branches. I even saw some uprooted parking meters - three feet of steel and concrete pulled clear out of the ground. There's a neat pile of cut branches and storm rubbish by the street in front of every house, waiting to be carted off.

You can see impressive pictures of the storm aftermath for yourself on the local photography site.

Yesterday I visited the Halifax citadel, which sits on a hill overlooking the central city and has magnificent views of the bay. Sadly, Halifax was hit hard by the darkest chapter in Canadian history - the epidemic of horrible sixties architecture - and no one in the fort had the presence of mind to open fire on the builders. So the Haligonian skyline is now a mix of nice old Victorian-style buildings, tall sea cranes, and a bunch of cardboard-colored squat boxes with chocolate brown windows.

The citadel itself is an old-style fort that is currently at version 4.0, the last upgrade taking place in 1856. Unlike the defensive batteries out in the bay, which guarded against Leviathans and pirates, the citadel was designed to protect Halifax from invasion by land. The potential invaders kept changing - first the local Indians, then the French, finally the United States - but the locals found it was always good to have a fort handy.

Now that the American threat has ebbed, the citadel is a museum of sorts, manned by soldiers in dorky kilts who get to shoot a cannon every day at noon. The innards of the museum are interesting and innocuous, except for the weirdly fetishistic Army museum, which has a 'gun nuts on eBay' vibe. There is a massive number of guns, medals, muskets, swords, and other hardware arrayed in glass cases, with many of the uniforms displayed on creepy pink-lipped plastic mannequins, all of whom are smiling. The walls have some terribly inept watercolors of Canadian gallantry in battle.

It looks funny for the first few rooms (muskets and sabers), but becomes macabre once the exhibit crosses into the Boer war and the early twentieth century. Canada has a long history of sending its young men off to die pointlessly for the British empire, and that history reaches its apotheosis in World War One. Canada joined the fighting in 1914 and suffered horrific losses - the Newfoundland regiment alone had an 80% casualty rate.

You would think the exhibit would allude to this, but instead it's an obsessive display of medals, regimental decorations, flags, guns, recruitment posters, and lovingly restored spiky German helmets. The tone even gets a little jocular - look at those funny-looking uniforms, and silly mustaches! More smiling milk-white mannequins.

Halifax was a boom town during both world wars - every Canadian soldier passed through here on his way to Europe. But it was also nearly obliterated towards the end of World War I, in 1917, when an ammunition ship carrying 2,500 tons of explosives collided with a Norwegian freighter in Halifax harbor. The ammunition ship caught fire immediately, but did not detonate for twenty minutes, giving it time to drift all the way to the downtown piers and attract a sizable crowd of onlookers.

When it finally went off, the blast levelled much of the town and killed or injured eleven thousand people. It was the biggest man-made explosion before the nuclear age. Five years earlier, Halifax had had to scramble to handle the hundreds of bodies brought in after the sinking of the Titanic. Now, in a terrible irony, the city was able to apply its expertise to counting and burying its own dead, and caring for the hundreds who had been blinded by flying glass when they went to watch the burning ship from their windows.

Most historical events in Canada seem to have a really good website associated with them - the Halifax Explosion is no exception, with several good links: There's a nice one-page summary site, a more comprehensive site from the CBC (try to ignore the part about the mini-series) and a good Wikipedia entry:

...Relief still came in from around North America and the world, but most speedy, and most generous was the help from Boston and from the state of Massachusetts to the south. To this day the citizens of Halifax still donate a large Christmas tree to Boston each year. The friendship also explains why even today many Nova Scotians are Boston Bruins and Boston Red Sox fans.

Which, with the hurricane, means it's been an especially rough month for the Haligonians.

I'm going to leave the hurricane damage and all the history behind me today, and drive north to see the highest tides on earth. Like the old proverb says, don't wait for Sunday to visit Fundy!

10.15.03

The Moon Wears A Sombrero

I flew in to Charlottesville last Thursday night in astonishingly bright moonlight. I didn't realize it, but the harvest hunter's full moon was on duty, and it had lit up the cloud tops right out to the horizon. You could count the rivets on the wing. There was a thick layer of stratus cloud just below us, with only an occasional gap giving away our true altitude, revealing a spider web of roads and subdivisions down on the ground.

As we neared Charlottesville, the plane made a long left turn to start its approach, and suddenly out popped the giant yellow moon. It was floating just above the horizon and wearing a long cloud on his head that looked exactly like a sombrero hat. All that was missing was the ball fringe.

"Buenos Noches", I thought.

I've been flying a lot this week - my itinerary makes a nice ASCII necklace:

BTV -> BOS -> ATL -> CHO -> CIN -> BTV -> MHT -> EWR -> YHZ

By some great luck, I have been seeing wonderful things from the plane all week. On the flight into Atlanta, there was thick overcast covering the city, and the plane descended into a sickly yellow world. The air was clear, but saturated with water. When the pilot extended the flaps for final approach, the entire wing burst into fog, from root to tip. Though the air around us was clear, the rear half of the wing was enveloped in a private, roiling cloud. It looked like someone had glued a hundred tons of cotton balls to the wing.

Many frequent fliers have seen the little wake vortices that sometimes spin off of a wing tip or a spar, but this was the first time I'd seen a whole wing swallowed up. A web search shows that condensation above lifting surfaces is very common, especially on military aircraft. That link points to the wonderful Gallery of Fluid Mechanics, which has photographs of all kinds of condensation and vortex action. In addition to garden-variedy wing fogs, there are more esoteric phenomena like the Prandtl-Glauert singularity, which is a condensation cloud that resembles a shock front. In this astounding movie clip, you can see a singularity form behind an F-16, disappear, and then re-form. Notice how severely the cloud buffets the plane - when the cloud re-forms, you can actually see the nose of the plane get shoved down. There's more info on the associated web page.

I flew from Charlottesville to Cincinnati at the black hour of six o'clock, the time when baggage handlers toss a football and the rest of the world sleeps. The airplane arrived over Ohio just as the pre-dawn twilight was brightening enough to show the ground, and I saw a giant snake of cloud eating its way across the landscape. It was the Ohio river, covered with thick morning fog. The scale of it was enormous - long tendrils of fog reached out into hollows, surrounding helpless towns. The Midwest was under attack by a giant angora python, and I was the only one who knew.

I've found that people who are not afraid of flying have little patience for people who are. We are the secret fraternity of armrest grippers; those who sit through takeoffs with eyes closed even though they aren't trying to sleep, others (my brothers!) who are compelled to stare out the window at the first tremor of turbulence, making sure the outside world doesn't flip over, and that the wings remain securely fastened to the sides of the plane.

Whenever I am particularly anxious about a flight, I buy an issue of Flying magazine to take on board with me. It is a balm for the scared traveller. Flying is aimed at the general-aviation pilot, weekend flyers who buzz around in small planes, and each issue is like a reassuring sermon. Hidden among all the GPS reviews, air show reports, and ads for airline training school is a morality tale, where the angels are Prudence, Sound Planning, Thoroughness, and Preparation, and the devils are Fatigue, Bad Luck, and Trying To Fly Under Visual Flight Rules In Marginal Weather Conditions. Pilots are exhorted to be Thorough, Prudent, and Practice Sound Planning, and are given vivid examples of what will happen if they do not. Each issue has a special section of FAA reports on recent crashes, a terse description of the incident followed by the body count, and where blame should properly be assigned. "March 30, 2002, On Approach to Talahassee. Injuries: 2 Fatal". There's also a regular column called "I Learned About Flying From That", which might as well be called "How I Almost Bought It In My Airplane", and my favorite colum, "Aftermath", where the author takes us through a single spectacular crash, detailing each fatal misstep leading to the gruesome accident.

The reason I find all this reassuring is because of the unspoken subtext that commercial air travel is really, really safe. General aviation pilots have a bit of a complex, because their fatality rate is uncomfortably high compared to road travel, let alone the utter safety of commercial aviation. This is exactly what I want to be reminded of when I am in a little Embraer jet at 37,000 feet, shaking like a Jello mold. In Flying magazine, you never see a report that says "Embraer pilot lost control of jet after wings snapped off in clear air turbulence. Injuries: 43 fatal". Instead, it's always "Piper cub pilot without instrument rating flew into thunderstorm", or "pilot became disoriented after flying into clouds at night", or "pilot allowed plane to enter graveyard spiral, overcorrected at 500 feet, plane broke up in flight".

Of course, there's a limit to the comfort you can get from a magazine in the stratosphere. But you take what you can get. I was heartened recently to discover that, after all this time, I had been wrong about what makes a plane fly in the first place. Instead of some dubious business about low pressure above the wing, there's the comforting thought of the plane pushing tons and tons of air down as it flies. I like the idea of the plane working hard to keep me in the air, not just relying on some kind of suction. So instead of Bernoulli, these days I fly with Isaac Newton. It's nice to look out over the wing and think I'm being kept aloft by sound English science, rather than some dodgy Continental quack.

10.12.03

Off to Nova Scotia

I will be in Halifax, Nova Scotia for all of next week, attending the IEEE Conference on Web Intelligence. I am supposed to give a ten-minute talk; the remaining minutes are mostly unscheduled. If you live in Halifax or are headed there for the same conference, send me an email and we can paint the town red. Not knowing Halifax well, I would also welcome tips on how to do this from the Nova Scotian diaspora.

10.09.03

The Great Antonio

Blork has written a nice farewell to the Great Antonio, an old-time Quebec strongman who died on Monday. His description of seeing the faded Antonio sitting on a park bench reminds me of the terrible day in high school when I realized that one of our Polish janitors was Wojciech Fortuna, winner of the Olympic gold medal in ski jumping at Sapporo.

Meanwhile, back in the States, our own strongmen are alive, thriving, and assuming elected office. And I am off again to Charlottesville, Virginia, looking forward to more grits and biscuits.

It's my belief that software, just like biscuits, is best served fresh, still warm from the compiler. So I'm writing tomorrow's demo on the plane - wish me luck!

Update: Montreal blogger Kate McDonnell writes in with a nice recent photo of the Great Antonio, and her own farewell.

10.09.03

I Will Smoke P. Diddy Like A Cheap Cigar

Here in deceptively peaceful Brandon, months of intensive training are building to a crescendo. The better half is carbo-loading for tomorrow's LSAT, the law school qualifying exam she has been preparing for since before time began. And I am entering the most intensive part of marathon training, where you have to cantilever yourself out of bed in the mornings because your knees won't bend. Where if you accidentally drop something, you say to yourself "I'll pick that up in November".

I stole a peek at the better half's enormous LSAT training manual, and noticed an eerie resemblance to the advice I'd been getting from my book on 'How To Run A Marathon':

• Get a good night's sleep
• Drink plenty of liquids
• Make sure you know where you need to be
• Show up early
• Pace yourself
• Wear layers in case you get too hot
• Don't be distracted by how well/poorly others are doing
• Wear a good watch
• Take it one section at a time
• Visualize yourself succeeding
• If you need a bathroom break, be quick
• Bring plenty of sharpened pencils

Before embarking on my journey into chronic pain fitness, I used to think running a marathon was simple:

while ( !crossed_finish_line) {
run();
}

Now I know better. The race itself may be just a race, but preparing for it can rival the Normandy invasion if you really want to let yourself go. There are tempo runs, recovery runs, hill runs, long runs, track intervals, speed work, fartleks (huh huh), timed miles, cross training, cool-downs and warm-ups, negative splits, hydration strategies, fibers that wick moisture away from your skin, energy drinks, bee-pollen bars, power gels. There are charts for your mileage and charts for your calorie intake. There are shoes to be replaced every 300 miles, middle-distance races to enter, strength training programs to follow, pages and pages of carbohydrate equivalency charts and useful recipes, dire lists of painful knee injuries to avoid. There is the whole business of tapering, carbo-loading, and adequate sleep. If you are obsessive-compulsive, this is truly the sport for you.

I've applied my usual standards of diligence and thoroughness to preparing for the New York race, which means that I stumble out of bed at one in the morning on alternate nights to stuff my forgotten running clothes into the washer, and then stumble out again at six to do a painful lap around the local marsh.

But I've learned something about the biomechanics of running.

It turns out the body has three basic speeds. The first two we know from high school - anaerobic exercise, where your muscles are working faster than your body can get oxygen to them, and aerobic exercise, where they get enough oxygen to go on indefinitely. Of course, if you cross into anaerobic exercise during a marathon, you are doomed - your muscles produce lactic acid, and soon you are paralyzed with cramps, laying on the road being trampled.

What I didn't know is that there are two fundamental types of aerobic exercise, depending on whether the body is burning carbohydrate or burning fat. Fat burning is good when you need a slow trickle of energy - desk jockeys are heated by fat, albeit in miniscule amounts - but for high-intensity exercise, you need sugar. Carbohydrate is easier for the body to burn quickly, and allows you to sustain a high level of effort. Your liver and muscles can hold about 1500 calories of the stuff, and you can eat a few hundred more carbohydrate calories during a long race. But if you're my weight, you'll need 3900 calories to complete the marathon.

When your body runs out of glycogen, it is not a happy feeling. A modern American body like mine has a limitless supply of high-energy fat (3500 calories/pound), but the stuff doesn't make for easy burning. The changeover from carbohydrate to fat is the physiological basis for the "wall" some runners hit late in a race. Skinny, fast people never hit it. But if you are a slow, lumbering blogger like me, there's someone I'd like you to meet right here at mile 15.

What makes the marathon so challenging, and such a mental race, is that it really does get much harder to run towards the end. The point of marathon training is to teach your body to conserve its carbohydrate fuel for a longer time, and run more efficiently. It also teaches your mind to ignore the feeling of being about to die, and keep ignoring it for two hours. For a first-time marathon runner like me, it takes 16 weeks, with at least three long runs of 18-20 miles, to get the body fit enough to run the race.

So when I hear that P. Diddy is going to run the marathon, and only started training for it three weeks ago, I laugh a hollow laugh. Does he really think that celebrity, money, and a small army of personal trainers can make up for three months of bitter work? Maybe in the governor's race, but this is a marathon, last bastion of Puritan values. Neglect your training in the gay, frolicsome days of summer, and you will reap the whirlwind in the medical tent come November. How can one even envision a scenario where I am not a distant blue dot on P. Diddy's horizon, disappearing into the mists of victory as he staggers into mile 13?

And yet... And yet, in the middle of my peaceful revery, I feel the cold, harsh blow of a dagger plunging into my back. "He's got a lot of personal trainers, you know" says the better half. "He used to play football."

"Football?" I ask, incredulous. "He lives a life of pampered luxury. He is taken everywhere in an armored land yacht. I've been running my heart out for months. I know I'm slow, but three weeks of training? Come on! I've got to be able to beat P. Diddy!"

"I'm sure you'll try your best, honey."

You have it right, dear reader. The viper warmed against my own chest, the treacherous blow from the very person I suspected least. All for what?

A couple of bad records, a line of ritzy clothing, an environment rich in bling bling.

I'm going to beat that overmoisturized dilletante if I have to lose a lung trying.

10.06.03

When Physicists Attack

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the saga of John Titor, self-proclaimed time traveler. Now Robert Brown, a professor of physics at Duke University, has taken a look at the details of Titor's story. And by 'taken a look', I mean 'utterly destroyed with the unquenchable fires of his all-consuming righteous anger':

Seriously, I could go on and on and on. I haven't even gotten to the raw thermodynamics of it all. That suitcase would require a small lake to cool in operation, for example. And then the culture capable of these miracles of technology that indicate total mastery of materials science, quantum mechanics, gravity, superconductors, a society that has in its possession a star drive (for the goddamn thing would clearly work as such as easily as a "time machine" -- arbitrary translation in four space is arbitrary translation in four space and they have to play all sorts of games to NOT go off into space FTL) then is sending somebody back to our time to get an IBM 5100, a piece of **** computer that is an embarrassment to IBM to this day, because it is somehow capable of some translation chore that appears to be beyond them and is related to the Unix non-problem of a 4 byte unsigned int counter for its current time?

What, did all the programmers in the world suffer brain damage in the war? Physics got really popular and they could no longer get anybody to learn to program? Computers do all the programming now and programming in C or perl is a lost art? Computers have come to life and are on strike for better working conditions so they are reduced to finding and bringing "back" an IBM 5100 (out of ALL THE COMPUTERS THAT WERE EVER BUILT) in preference to just bringing back a goddamn programming reference for the language(s) they need to translate and building a translator with e.g. perl on a 2036 teraflop PDA?

He does go on and on and on. It's wonderful.

10.04.03

Reptilian Kitten-Eaters, Canadian Beefcake

Last Wednesday, I fired up the old Saturn and drove to Montreal to meet the YULbloggers, a loose confederation of people who meet once a month for dinner at the kind of pub I would chew an arm off to have in my own town. I got to meet some people whose sites I had long read, like Martine Page and Aaron Cope, as well as hitherto unsuspected bloggers like Boris, Stephanie, Marie-Jo, Maggie, and (cringe) a handful of nice people whose names in my memory didn't survive the long trip south.

The YULbloggers were hospitable and charming. Once I got over everyone's terrifying ability to switch between fluent English and French in mid-sentence, I had a great time.

Rather than drive home in the wee hours, I decided to spend the night in Canada, and found myself a motel in the strip mall wasteland south of Montreal, contented and happy. Spending the night meant the double treat of watching Canadian late-night TV, then listening to morning drive time radio at first light.

The radio certainly lived up to my high hopes - it informed me that someone named Dalton McGuinty had been elected to a position of importance in Ontario, despite his opponent having issued a press release in which he called McGuinty an "evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet".

That's just the kind of reason I like to travel to the parallel universe called Canada. Consider that our most populous state is about to elect a left-breast-groping, Teutonic meat mountain to be its governor, while the new leader of Ontario is a colorless, odorless nonentity whose biggest crime is looking too much like Norman Bates. And who gets called a kitten-eater?

Consider further that, in the States, if your name is "Dalton McGuinty" you might as well call yourself "Unelectable McLoser".

Obviously we have a lot to learn from Canadian politics.

Late-night TV at the Days Inn turned out to be no less inspiring. The first program I came across was the "Canada's Strongest Man" semifinal, in which fifteen guys who looked like the Michelin man competed in various feats of strength, like hoisting large stone beach balls onto a wooden platform.

Mildly hopped up on my can of '5 agrumes' soda, I greeted "Canada's Strongest Man" with the kind of derisive snort I usually reserve for "Canada's [superlative] X", where [superlative] is not one of 'coldest', 'largest' or 'most remote'. But the snort froze in my nose when I saw the Paul Bunyan types in action, hauling Mack trucks with their teeth and playfully tossing tree trunks at each other.

Canada produces large men. There's no denying it - something to do with northern latitudes, lumberjacks and hockey players, meals rich in protein and gravy. And it turns out that Quebec in particular has a rich strongman tradition. Halfway through the program, there was a nice retrospective about the granddaddy of Canadian strongmen, Louis Cyr. A native of Quebec, the 'Canadian Samson' had spent most of his short life humiliating the few weightlifters foolish enough to compete with him. Not only had every Strongest Man contestant heard of Cyr, but they all spoke about him in the same hushed, reverential voice.

Just a few of his confirmed lifts, in no particular order:

• 550 pounds with right middle finger
• 3635 pounds with his back
• 273 pound barbell pressed above his head
• four draft horses unable to pry his arms apart

Louis Cyr had a colorful life - he worked as a lumberjack, then did a stint as a Canadian cop. It goes without saying that the crime rate in his precinct fell. His wife was a frail little thing, never weighing more than 100 pounds, or about the weight Louis could hold with his arm fully extended. She probably spent most of her marriage in the kitchen: Cyr believed that the real foundation of a strength regimen was eating as much food as he could possibly fit, an approach that eerily foreshadows my own theories on marathon training.

There is a very nice French-language website devoted to Cyr, along with a more abbreviated English biography that goes into some of his greatest feats in more detail. And don't miss the photos of Cyr in a fig leaf.

It turns out there's a whole world of interesting websites devoted to Victorian and early 20th century body building. I especially recommend this set of galleries, featuring some rare vintage action shots, as well as a capsule history of bodybuilding, which culminates in our very own Aaahnold. See if you can spot the point at which they start using anabolic steroids.

While it's true that the bar was not always set as high for muscle men in those pre-steroid days, the Sandow Museum site in particular has some stunning examples of 1930's bodies that wouldn't look out of place on a modern magazine cover, provided you got rid of the Brylcreem.

I am particularly fascinated by the three-way split between physical culturists like Charles Atlas, who were trying their best to look like Greek statuary without much thought about strength, brute-force strongmen like Louis Cyr, who didn't look anything like Greek statuary but could probably pulverize it with their bare hands, and the 'scientific' bodybuilders, who pioneered methods like free weights, resistance training, and all the other strength-building techniques we take for granted today.

I'm also fascinated by the aesthetics of old-time beefcake. When did the hot fig-leaf-and-club photo fall out of style? And just what are the origins of the Fred Flintstone outfit?

I can't wait to go back to Canada.

10.04.03

"French Rockets In Iraq" Story Discredited

Yesterday Glenn Reynolds and others linked to a Reuters story about brand-new French anti-aircraft rockets found in Iraq. The rockets were supposedly manufactured in 2003, making them hyper-illegal and implying that France was actively arming Iraq during the buildup to Gulf War II:

WARSAW (Reuters) - Polish troops in Iraq have found four French-built advanced anti-aircraft missiles which were built this year, a Polish Defense Ministry spokesman told Reuters Friday.

But in today's Gazeta Wyborcza, we find out that our brave soldiers just misread the date:

According to Polish diplomats in Rome, the confusion was caused by an error made by Polish soldiers: the date on the French rockets was an expiration date, and not the date of manufacture. "The Minister of National Defense, Jerzy Szmajdzinski, expresses regret in connection with information on the alleged production date of the missiles. He has requested a full investigation into the incident and a report without delay".

It now seems the French rockets were sold to Iraq way before the embargo, back when the US and other Western nations were falling over themselves to sell arms to Iraq.

The story did not get cleared with the Ministry of Defense or any other bigwigs before being made public. The French government is really, really, really ticked off at Poland, and I can't say I blame them.

Next week: Polish troops in Iraq get sick from drinking expired milk.