Paintball

My family and i spent Saturday morning playing paintball with a group of my wife's co-workers. I don't have much to say about it except that it's really, really fun. It'd be easy to identify a few ethical dilemmas and to ridicule the goofiness of a bunch of middle-class desk workers gathering to play war; but it'd all be cancelled out by the fact that it's simply too much fun. You can't really knock good (though perhaps not so clean) fun that's not at anyone's expense.

Boston

Since it was the boys' spring break, we made the Boston Marathon into a short family vacation. We took a red-eye on Friday night to JFK and then on to Boston. Our hotel was actually in Cambridge, just across the river from Boston University. We got into Boston so early that we couldn't get our room right away, so we had to spend the most of Saturday wandering around Boston and Cambridge. We walked around the Boston U area, and we finally took a cab to the marathon expo, which was at the World Trade Center, basically a convention hall along the wharfs.

The expo was wall-to-wall people so we didn't hang out for long after picking up my race junk. We managed to get back to the Boston U. area via the "T", Boston's subway system. It was fairly painless, although they have a slightly odd ticket purchase system. We finally got a room at the hotel, and we crashed until dinner time. Our hotel was right next to MIT, so we walked through the campus that evening to get dinner at Bertucci's, one of a chain of Italian places.

Sunday was Nathan's 12th birthday, so we let him choose the day's activities. We ended up at the Boston Museum of Science. It's an excellent science museum, though it's got a strange combination of hands-on, Exploratorium-style exhibits and old-school wildlife dioramas. The highlight for me was the "Colby room", which is a complete room that was once in the house of a certain Colonel Colby. Colby was a big-game hunter, and the room is a large study/library room filled with the remnants of endangered wildlife. This guy pretty much shot one of everything it seems. Very strange and unsettling, but fascinating in both a historical sense and a macabre sense.

Monday was marathon day. One of the lesser-known facts about the Boston marathon is that not that much of it is actually in Boston. It starts in a town called Hopkinton well outside of Boston, so the organizers bus the participants from Boston's Back Bay area out to Hopkinton in the morning. For some reason, very early in the morning so that most of the runners are at the pre-race village by 9 even though the race doesn't start until noon. So we got to hang around for 3 hours waiting for the race to start, trying to stay warm, and standing in Port-a-john lines. Although the "athletes' village" was divided into 2 parts this year (one for the noon start, one for the 12:30 wave), that's still a whole lotta humanity to pack on to what is basically a high-school practice field.

A bit after 11 they started shuffling us toward the gear buses and then the start line. You have to walk about a mile or so to the actual start area. I was in the 6th corral, which was unusual for me. Even at Chicago and the San Diego RnR marathons, which have more entrants, i was in the first corral so i wasn't that far from the start. Finally the race was started, but it took another couple of minutes to get moving and another to get to the start line. By the start we were able to run at a decent pace, but it was crowded and would never really thin out.

Going down the road in Hopkinton i immediately realized why Boston is not your average marathon. Crowds lined the road and they were really cheering. Not just the normal "you can do it" sort of cheers, but real honest-to-god cheering. I haven't felt so much like a real athlete since high school basketball. I don't remember much about the course at this stage except for the large number of people (all men) who jumped off the road to relieve themselves. The road is so crowded at this stage that you don't really have much of an opportunity to lock into a pace and drift off.

The first real landmark i remember is the Wellesley college crowd, almost entirely female, who are known for being very, very loud. They lived up to the rep. I did not stop for a hug as many do, but it still felt like a small rock-star moment.

Throughout the course, i slapped more spectator hands than ever before. Normally, i tend to ignore the spectators as much as i can, but there's some compulsion at Boston to interact with the crowd. I had no idea how fast i could run, whether this would be like Phoenix where i didn't hit the wall, or like previous marathons where i've felt good for 20 and then crashed. I decided on 7:30 pace for no good reason, and i was having good luck at sticking to it though my legs definitely didn't feel as good as Phoenix. The more intense speed training i did prior to Phoenix obviously made a big difference, but i wasn't sure how much. I felt pretty good coming into the big uphills near the town of Newton, so i just kept chugging along.

I made it up Heartbreak Hill without major problems, though i obviously lost some time to pace. But once i hit the downhill, i started to feel pretty good. I was over 7:30 pace, and i hit the 24 mile mark in about 3:02 (7:30 pace = 3:00 hours), but no crash. The final couple of miles were just great, as the crowd was cheering and my legs felt good and we were going through an interesting part of Boston. I kept cranking, and i even had a bit left for a mild kick at the end. I finished in 3:18.50, about 7:35 pace; but i felt pretty good about the race. I really didn't think going into the marathon that i'd be able to break 3:20 again, especially on this course. It's very gratifying to run a Boston qualifying time at Boston.

There wasn't a lot left of race day. I met up with Em and the kids and we took the T back to the hotel. We cleaned up and went to Legal Seafoods for dinner so that i could protein-load, which i've found to be an excellent aid to recovery (or maybe just a good reason to eat a steak. Whatever.)

On Tuesday we went to Harvard Square and walked around the campus. We bought a Harvard sweatshirt for one of my nephews, knocked around the Harvard book store, and then got some lunch at a local cafe. Emily and the boys were amused by the "Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe" sign in the window across the street. After lunch we took the T over to Fenway park and bought a Bosox shirt for my other nephew. We headed back to the hotel, and then walked to a nearby Trader Joe's to get some food for dinner.

Wednesday was mostly a travel day. We had to check out at noon and our flight was at 4, so we headed to the airport in the late morning, checked our luggage, and then took the T over to the New England aquarium. The aquarium was way too busy, so we just wandered around on the wharfs and grabbed some lunch. Other than an encounter with a slightly belligerent subway denizen who wanted to rant about immigrants, it was an uneventful trip and we made it back to the airport with plenty of time to spare.

Ultimately, i guess i'm just glad that Boston wasn't too anti-climactic. I'd put so much effort into getting there that i was afraid that the race itself would be an afterthought. But Boston is designed to be special, not only because it's been going on for 110 years but also because of the Monday noon start and the fact that it's a holiday and the race gets so much attention. For days when you walk around Boston you see people with marathon gear and, after the race, people will wear their finisher medals even though the race is long over. Unlike most marathons, Boston is not about first timers or "just" finishing or even (for better or worse) raising money for charity. Boston is elitist in the sense that it is exclusionary and competitive. Virtually everyone at Boston is a "serious" marathoner, and it doesn't matter to any of the participants whether anyone else cares because for those 3+ hours it's only the rest of the field that counts.

Four Things

A friend of mine tagged me with this meme via e-mail, but i decided to post my responses here also.

Four jobs I have had in my life:

1. Crop inspector (no, seriously)
2. Golf-ball retriever (from ponds, to resell)
3. Lab assistant
4. Computer geek

Four movies I would watch over and over:

1. The Third Man
2. Blade Runner
3. Singing in the Rain
4. Any of the LotR trilogy

Four places where I have lived:

1. Woodburn, Indiana
2. Buckeye, Arizona
3. Tucson, Arizona
4. San Diego, California

Four TV shows I watch:

1. Lost
2. My Name is Earl
3. Avatar: The Last Airbender
4. The Office

Four places I have been on vacation:

1. Italy
2. Hawaii
3. Kings Canyon
4. The Philippines

Four websites i visit daily:

1. ESPN.com
2. LetsRun.com
3. Fark.com
4. BoingBoing.net

Four of my favorite foods:

1. That rigatoni thing my wife makes
2. Salmon picatta
3. Dark chocolate
4. Panang curry with duck

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. At home
2. Running, anywhere.
3. London
4. Santiago, Chile (never been there, but i'd like to go)

Boston Bib Number

I got my Boston race information packet today. I was relieved to find that my bib number is in the first 10000, so i get to go off in the first wave. This is the first year that Boston is instituting a two-wave start (one at noon, the second at 12:30) to alleviate the crowds in the neighborhoods of Hopkington where the race begins. I was resigned to being in the second wave, but i'm pretty happy to be in the first group. I know that it'll take a while to get across the start in any case-- so my gun time will be much slower than my net time-- but at least i won't be as impatient in the starting area.

The War in Iraq

After 3 years, the war in Iraq still confuses me. I continue to believe that we shouldn't have gone to war, that the evidence for WMD in the country is dubious, that the pre-war intelligence was intentionally exaggerated, and that the connection between Iraq and 9/11 is non-existent. But i'm willing to believe Iraq was a potential laboratory for weapons development; in fact i bought into that argument until the UN weapons inspectors failed to find any evidence. And even though there was no relationship between the opportunistic and essentially secular regime of Saddam and the Islamic radicals who constitute our obstensible enemy, there's little doubt that he was a pyschopath who could have evolved into the Arabic world's version of Hitler.

Today you can hear reports that Iraq is on or past the brink of civil war while at the same time hearing that democratic government is beginning to take hold. I think that both are possibly true and that both are possibly false. Mostly i think that neither is really a situation that we can make sense of given our (or at least my) frames of reference. In our relatively prosperous and stable society, the institutions of democratic government function with frustrating uncertainty, and even with those institutions our country has managed to reach civil war. But i don't think the history of the US Civil War can teach us much about the deep-seeded cultural and religious differences that prevail in the middle East. So i don't think either democracy or civil war are touchstones that we can use to identify the situation in Iraq, though the latter fits better on top of chaos.

My only moral absolute in life is that i'd do anything to make a safe future for my kids. If i thought that waging war against Iraq would accomplish that, i'd be all for it. I'd enlist. But it won't, and every time i hear about needing another X billions of dollars for the war or about the nuclear ambitions of Iran or about the further erosion of our civil liberties in the name of the war on terror, i sense that we're heading toward a future that will make me long for the days of the cold war. It seems not only likely, but inevitable, that we will see more terrorist attacks in the future on US soil, maybe even nuclear attacks; that in the wake of those attacks our people will be willing to make more concessions to government surveillance; and that our economic growth will be inhibited by the dollars we'll have to spend controlling our borders and battling our nebulous enemy. If this is the outcome of protecting our interests, then i would hate to see the alternative.

Runners Are So Bad-Ass

I thought this was really cool:

http://washtimes.com/upi/20060316-055748-9608r.htm

Basically a story about a runner chasing down a thief. Funny.

My First Ultra

More proof that i'm teetering on the edge of sanity: i ran my first ultra-marathon today, the Lake Hodges 50k. Granted, it was only 50k (about 31 miles), but it was also raining and occasionally hailing, and since it had rained for a few days prior the whole course was mud. Here's a picture i took of today's weather. That white stuff is hail:


The course was brutal. It consisted of two roughly 16 mile out/backs, in the middle of which was a 3 mile loop of up and down single track. There were two stream crossings with water that came about half the way up my calf. It took me over 5 hours to finish. I didn't push too hard since i have to run Boston next month, but it was still pretty grueling.

How Do You Make Complex Things?

Lots of people think about software architecture and systems design and system validation and software economics, etc. Research has been done on the group dynamics of engineering and there's an abundance of project management books. And complex systems do get built: bridges, airplanes, phone switching software. But i'm still convinced it's an order of magnitude harder than it should be.

The problem is human beings. Not that i'm all that crazy about Syknet either, but while you could at least imagine a technique for describing and optimizing the relationships between correctly specified subsystems, you can't do it with people. Even describing inter-human relationships in a statistical way is not particularly useful, because average behavior can't be applied to a single situation in a meaningful way (if i know that 50% of all projects fail, then i know that my project has a 50% chance of failing, that's true; but in practice you almost always have a better sense at the outset of what your chances of success are).

Probably the best statement of the problem is Mark Pilgrim's "Morons and Assholes" post. In it he argues that all developers are either morons or assholes. However, most readers miss the point that a comfortable mix of assholes and morons is the best case scenario. Not infrequently, projects get too many morons or too many assholes, or at least one particulary strident sociopath (Pilgrim's term for morons who become assholes). Two sociopaths can destroy a project before it even gets started. The chance of any given person being a sociopath i'd estimate at about 10%.

If all workers were equal and you graphed productivity vs. number of people you'd get a curve that increases less and less rapidly up to about 6 people, then levels off, then starts to asymptotically drop back to 0. So 2 people do slightly less than 2x as much work, while 5 people do maybe 3x as much work, and 20 people do nothing useful. The traditional approach to address this problem is to create a management hierarchy so that the pool of people is divided into either functional or project groups (or both in the dreaded "matrix") with one person in the group designated as the main intergroup communicator.

The opposite extreme in my view would be to create an environment where systems emerge that address specific needs because there is a market for it. Groups will naturally optimize to the right size because the best, most timely solution wins. Communication between groups becomes less of an issue because the solution of group A either meets the needs of group B and so succeeds, or it doesn't and fails. The main problem with this evolutionary/market process is that it requires a fair number of participants and enough capital to get all of the variations to a point sufficient to be evaluated. It's not quite as farfetched as it sounds though. Think of the way that large companies tend to often buy companies that address their business needs rather than trying to compete with them.

My opinion is that complex systems in the future will more frequently get built according to the second model and its inevitable refinements. Much of the Internet itself and software surrounding it have has some of this flavor. I think the reason for this is the lower barrier to entry. It requires much less capital to start an interesting Internet service than it does to develop a useful aircraft component. I assume this to be because of the commodity pricing of computer hardware, the availability of nearly-free software, and the standards that prevail in the Internet world, both by committee and de facto.

My Wife's Tattoo

This is a picture of my wife's new tattoo:


It's just a design, not a picture of anything in particular; though it has a kind of Rorschach-like effect in that most people think it looks like something. She's been wanting to get a tattoo for a while now, and for whatever reason her 41st birthday seemed to be the occasion.

My Calf Hurts

I have this. It sucks. I can't run without discomfort, and i've been doing bike rides lately to keep in shape. I actually ran 20 miles last Saturday, but it hurt. The worst part is that it seems to be really slow to heal. It'll feel OK for a couple of days, and then i'll try to run on it or do martial arts and it'll pop again.

The only good thing i can say about this is that it's made me appreciate how much i need to run. I really miss being able to go out and run pain-free for an hour or so whenever i want. It's not the exercise per se, because biking doesn't give me the same sense. Running, because it's not equipment intensive and doesn't require any special facilities, is about freedom. Without it i feel limited.