This post is several months late. I am basically catching up to my 50to50 list all at once, but for aesthetic reasons prefer to break them out into separate posts and backdate them 🙂 So, for the record, month 49 should have been posted on January 14th, 2020 but was actually posted on March 25.
These are my 2019 biking statistics from Strava:
508.9 miles
48 hours, 39 minutes
21,975 feet
28 rides
This was the result of intermittent effort, with me still really exploring and being tentative about how far I could go. The above does include some mountain biking, but mostly road. My wife bought me a brand new mountain bike (a 2019 Trek Roscoe) for our anniversary in 2018, and I am still making do with my old 2011 Trek 7.3 hybrid for road rides. I’ve upgraded to clips, a better helmet, safety gear like a helmet mirror and electric lights, and learned how to change a tire.
This year, i am determined to break the 1000 mile mark. Assuming I miss a month for Ramadan and another month for Ashara and other various events or reasons, and rounding down a bit to allow for laziness here and there, i’m assuming I have 40 weekends available. Therefore I resolve to ride at least 25 miles a week to hit my goal. Unlike last month’s resolution, this one has data – via a Garmin Instinct watch connected to my Strava account. So I can monitor my progress – and so can anyone else 🙂 Follow me on Strava and keep me honest! (and give me the occasional kudos, too. It helps!)
Spoilers below the fold. My thoughts on the movie to follow later, and it’s not a spoiler to say I personally loved it. Also, the image on this post has nothing to do with the contents. It’s just bad-ass, so I’m including it.
I drink too much caffeine. In college, I was notorious for drinking multiple cans of coke a day. In grad school, I made the switch to Diet and lost 10 pounds in a month. That was my peak Chipotle phase, too, clocking in around 175.
In the past few years, since moving to California, I’ve drastically reduced my caffeine intake from Coke (having made the switch to Coke Zero, which my crude palette likes as much if not better than original Coke, and miles better than Diet). I basically order it when we eat out, which is a few times a month, and on weekends once in a while. I estimate that I currently drink 5-10 cans a month.
However, I inhale coffee. I have at least two (large) cups in the morning (one on waking up either at home or at Starbucks, another on reaching work) and another in the afternoon (usually to stave off hunger from intermittent fasting). I also will make a cup in the evening if I need to stay up, and on weekends I typically have a few cups too. I estimate that I drink about 75 cups of coffee a month.
I can’t give up on coffee. I’m not really an aficionado of the taste – I can tell great coffee from terrible, but good vs bad coffee is not always clear. Low standards indeed, because for me it is purely functional. I did go nuts over Pumpkin Spice for a while but I’m well and truly over that now. My go-to drink at Starbucks is a flat white with sugar free hazelnut and vanilla, just enough flavor to keep me interested but not attentive. The bottom line is, I don’t get enough sleep, so I drink coffee.
Caffeine consumed 0, 3, and 6 hours before bedtime significantly reduced total sleep time. Even caffeine consumed 6 hours before bed reduced total nightly sleep amounts by more than 1 hour.
Caffeine consumed at all three points diminished sleep quality. Caffeine taken 3 and 6 hours before bedtime, as well as caffeine consumed at bedtime, significantly increased the amount of time spent awake during the night.
Disruptions to sleep as a result of caffeine were perceived by volunteers (as recorded in sleep diaries) for caffeine consumed at bedtime and 3 hours before bed, but were not reported for caffeine taken 6 hours before bed. However, sleep monitors measuring total sleep time and sleep efficiency (time spent sleeping relative to total time spent in bed) showed that caffeine consumed 6 hours before bedtime had significant detrimental effects to both.
That third point is the most surprising. It means that even if you don’t perceive an impact on your sleep, there still may be one. I haven’t tried to replicate the study on myself because I don’t have/want a sleep tracker, but the point is compelling.
This makes it easy to resolve to stop drinking caffeine after 2pm and limit myself to two cups of coffee a day. I’ll just switch to water (which I drink a lot more of since buying myself a cool hydroflask with a Joshua Tree design).
Table 3 from the study referred to above. Click for full-text link.
in roughly one month, I will be 50 months from 50 years old. A friend of mine on Facebook just reached that milestone and decided to embrace it as a driving force for change:
I realized today that I’m 50 months away from being 50 years old. At first that seemed shockingly close, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I CAN DO SO MUCH in fifty months to make significant improvements to my life and the lives of the people around me.
So here is my commitment: I will make one small change every month between now and December 24th, 2023. I will share each change and my progress publicly. I want to see what’s possible in 50 months.
I love everything about this. I intend to follow suit, and will document it here.
Any ideas on what changes i should make? I have to come up with 50, after all :p
NBC Universal’s new streaming service will be called Peacock. It seems they have decided to go the mix of old content/new content route like everyone else, which is understandable. Less so is this:
The streaming service will offer a slate of original series from showrunners who have worked with NBCUniversal on a series of other shows, including Mike Schur (The Good Place, Parks and Recreation) and Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot). Schur will oversee the reboot of comedy Punky Brewster for the service, while Esmail will handle a reboot of beloved sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica.
All this has happened before, and will happen again.
Finished Season 3, and it was exactly the nostalgia/dopamine rush that I wanted. Like everyone else, the most delightful part for me was Dusty-bun and Susie-poo’s duet: (visual spoilers)
It gave me the exact same wistful childhood feeling as another homage duet – from Community season 1, “Environmental Science”:
Apologies for links to political blogs. There’s some math here. The question is, what is the probability that one person could have survived two mass shootings (e.g., Gilroy and Las Vegas) ?
One fellow provides this calculation:
Las Vegas 2017 attendance: 20,000
Gilroy 2019 attendance: 80,000
I don’t know how many attendees were actually physically present at each event at the time of the shootings, but I’ll assume two thirds, so 14,520 and 52,800.
Proportion of US population present at LV shooting: 14,520 / 350,000,000 = .000041 or .0041%
Proportion of the population NOT at LV is the inverse or 99.9959%
Likelihood of one person being at both events is then: 1 – (.999959^52,800). Which is 88.8%. The number of times this apparently happened is 3, so it’s 0.888^3, or 70%.
In other words, through purely random chance it is more likely than not that 3 people who were at the LV 2017 shooting would also be present at the Gilroy shooting.
another fellow, who is a member of Mensa, provides this calculation:
The Gilroy Garlic Festival is a three-day event, so that 80,000 is reduced to 26,667 before being reduced another one-third as per Uncephalized’s assumption to account for the timing of the event. This brings us to an estimated 17,787 people present at the time of the shootings. Note that reducing the estimated 20,000 Las Vegas attendance by the same one-third gives us 13,340, not 14,520.
[…]
Gilroy probability: Dividing 17,787 by 350,000,000 results in a probability of 0.00005082, or one in 19,677.
Las Vegas probability: Dividing 13,340 by 350,000,000 results in a probability of 0.00003811428, or one in 26,237
Gilroy AND Las Vegas probability: Multiplying 0.00005082 by 0.00003811428 results in a probability of 0.0000000019369677096, or one in 516,270,868.
Someone posits in a comment to the second calculation, meekly, that perhaps the problem is analogous to the “birthday problem“. The Mensan responds:
No. That’s not relevant here because there is no equivalent to the finite number of birthdays in a year.
I’m personally not smart enough to be admitted to Mensa. However, it seems to me that the number of people in the United States is a finite number.
I’ll be eating a quick lunch with some friends of mine who are still in high school. They’ll ask me what I’ve been up to the last few weeks, and I’ll tell them that I’ve been learning category theory. They’ll ask me what category theory is about. I tell them it’s about abstracting things by looking at just the structure-preserving morphisms between them, rather than the objects themselves. I’ll try to give them the standard example Gp, but then I’ll realize that they don’t know what a homomorphism is. So then I’ll start trying to explain what a homomorphism is, but then I’ll remember that they haven’t learned what a group is. So then I’ll start trying to explain what a group is, but by the time I finish writing the group axioms on my napkin, they’ve already forgotten why I was talking about groups in the first place. And then it’s 1PM, people need to go places, and I can’t help but think:
Man, if I had forty hours instead of forty minutes, I bet I could actually have explained this all.
This book is my attempt at those forty hours.
This project has evolved to more than just forty hours.
it’s not even thursday yet, and i have to deal with this?
Hulu is developing a TV series adaptation of the novels from prolific showrunner Carlton Cuse (Lost, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Locke & Key) and feature writer Jason Fuchs (Wonder Woman, Ice Age: Continental Drift).
…
Cuse and Fuchs, both fans of the iconic title, will write, executive produce and showrun the proposed series, a modern updating of the classic story now in development at Hulu via ABC Signature and Cuse’ Genre Arts. Fuchs is writing the pilot script.
considering that the last reboot seemed to have been conceived by Ark B types, my expectations are as low as a Poghril’s morale. But fine, whatever. I always have the radio scripts – of which the latest radio sequel was superb (and the audiobook of Colfer’s sequal was even better).
The recent BBC adaption of Dirk Gently was actually pretty good, though it had a Game of Thrones/LOTR like relationship with the source material. If anything I’d rather see more development there than yet another swing for the Heart of Gold. But hey, these guys are fans of the material, who knows. No one can take the radio scripts away from me, at least.
