No Running Again

I haven't blogged about my running for the last couple weeks because there hasn't been any running for the last couple weeks. October 2, will be the second full week with no running.

I'm taking a break again in an effort to let my hip heal. Last week I used the elliptical trainer a couple times. It's painfully monotonous. I'll likely hop on it again tomorrow morning.

My only exercise this week has been the walking commute back and forth to work each day which, if I make the trip four times a day, amounts to three miles. And then there were all those tasty twelve ounce beverages I lifted...

I did manage to put out another podshow this morning. I don't know if it's better than the last one or not, but I'm really getting into the podcast scene. There's so many good shows out there and I'm just scratching the surface. I really do think podcasting will revolutionize the media... except that big media companies are going to own the pipes that make up the internet and will eventually squash what they don't control.

I'm looking forward to the day when free wireless access points are so ubiquitous that we won't need the big media companies fat pipes anymore... except that they will lobby Congress to have the FCC regulate the public off the airwaves. So depressing.

Ah well, everyone should check out Karmabanque.com.

Book Review: The Four-Minute Mile

I picked up a copy of Roger Bannister's The Four-Minute Mile earlier this summer. I have the 40th Anniversary Edition published in 1994 by The Globe Pequot Press. Amazon.com has a 50th Anniversary Edition (2006) for sale.

I really enjoyed the book. Like most books I read, it had some slow sections, but it has so many wonderful sections that it's definitely worth reading all the way through. I also found it interesting that the book manages to build some suspense, even though I knew he would eventually break the four-minute mile.

On the opening page in the introduction Bannister quotes himself from the 1981 publication regarding his statement that a 3:30 mile would be possible saying it

"is not impossible provided some harmony prevails in our uneasy world and the sheer stupidity of political chicanery is held at bay."

As a person who only returned to running in May of 2006 after an eight year hiatus, I could identify with many of the thoughts about running that Bannister had to offer.

Bannister takes us on a journey through his life. From his time spent as a child outrunning neighborhood bullies, to his time spent at Oxford beginning in 1946 and finally the journey ends in 1954 with his close win over the then world record holder for the mile, John Landy of Australia.

What I found most amazing was how little training Bannister actually did during his quest to break the four-minute mile. If I read things correctly, he only ran for about half an hour a day and he was attending medical school during his pursuit.

Bannister tells us about a racing tour he took through Europe in 1950 and that while riding up a lift in the Eiffel Tower, he decided he was going to drop out and just hitch-hike around Europe. He didn't even bother to get out of the lift and take in the view he was so excited to get started on his new adventure.

In 1952 during the Cold War, Bannister ran for England in the Olympic Games at Helsinki. We are treated to some great stories about arriving at Helsinki and the treatment that they received from the Soviets. Bannister tells us about some of the conversation he and his roommates had during the evenings. We learn about the legendary Emil Zatopek and his graciousness. Apparently the night before his run in the 10,000 meters a reporter came in to his room around midnight asking for an interview. Zatopek granted him the interview and when he heard the reporter didn't have a bed for the night, he offered up his own.

If you're a runner or a sports history enthusiast, you should check your local library or used book store for a copy of this book. It's a pretty short read and well worth the time and effort.

"We run, not because we think it is doing us good, but because we enjoy it and cannot help ourselves. It also does us good because it helps us to do other things better. It gives a man or woman the chance to bring out power that might otherwise remain locked away inside. The urge to struggle lies latent in everyone. The more restricted our society and work become, the more necessary it will be to find some outlet for this craving for freedom. No one can say, 'You must not run faster than this, or jump higher than that.' The human spirit is indomitable."

Fall Pumpkin

podcast.insipid.com

I've completed work on my first podcast. It's available for download at podcast.insipid.com and I believe I've jumped through all the required hoops to make it available via iTunes podcast subscription service, but it hasn't shown up there yet. I'm told it takes a half a day or so.

This first show is mostly a runcast and I give some of the early history of Lawrence, Kansas where I live and run. I hope you'll enjoy it, download it and put it in your mp3 player and take it with you for your next workout.

If you have any feedback send it to podcast@insipid.com.

I'm hoping to produce new shows at least monthly as time allows.

Dan-Quixote

One of the greatest minds I've ever had the pleasure of knowing has finally put up his own web site. Right now it's mostly a photo blog with pictures taken in western Kansas. People who think Kansas is boring and flat should take a look, there's some mighty interesting places in Kansas.

And Dan's mind is a mighty interesting thing as well. When I was going to school, Dan lived in the same town as me and I spent many hours drinking from the well of his intellect. He's an avid reader and possesses a great knowledge of history and human behavior. Unfortunately for me and his friends in town, Dan left here about 10 or so years ago and went home to help his parent's with their hog farm. We've stayed in touch via email and the occasional phone call and now Dan's joining the "blogosphere." I hate that word, but I'm glad to see he's coming online.

I've posted some of Dan's original work before and since he's put up his new site, I thought I'd post another piece from an email exchange we had shortly after the "liquid bomb" bunk came out.

Dave,

Oh jesus. This is the one I've been waiting for since 9-11. Why strap on a bomb when you can do this:

"However, it isn't entirely clear that even body cavity searches are enough. If we're looking for a movie plot, why not just get a sympathetic surgeon to implant explosives into your abdomen! A small device that looks just like a pace maker could be the detonator, and with modern methods, you could do something like setting it off by rapping "shave and a haircut" on your own chest. You could really do this -- and I'd like to see them catch that one."

Allah o Akbar.

As for this latest 'threat', I don't know if you ever watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC or not, but he's very good. I do the Daily Show, Colbert, and Olbermann from 10-12 every night. Two nights ago they did a pretty lengthy piece where they went back to 9-11 and showed ten examples (they had many more but used only the ten most obvious ones) since that time where the Bushites used the hyping of bogus terror plots, which were later either discredited or turned out to be re-hashed re-workings of old or outdated intelligence, to ratchet up the fear factor just before an election, following some good news for the Democrats, or to counter some glaring piece of bad news for their own side. This latest one clearly was timed to coincide with Lieberman's defeat, and the Brits are already claiming the US forced them to jump the gun on the investigation, demanding it go down 'right now', and undermining hopes for successful prosecutions. The boy continues to cry wolf, while he cuts spending for 'Homeland Security', rapes the treasury, sends the price of fuel into the stratosphere, and de-stabilizes the entire world. The 'threats' always turn out to be overblown, but they serve the purpose of overturning Lincoln and allowing the neoConmen to fool enough of the people enough of the time.

Speaking of the stratosphere and in-flight terror, have you been following the research on jet contrails? Jet travel in general is not only a tremendous waste of fuel resources so people can engage in 'ego' tourism, but it spreads disease (or will, when the big one hits), bed bugs, Eurotrash, and the contrails from it which crisscross our sky are now known to be a major contributor to the greenhouse effect http://tinyurl.com/nauem. Seen from space, the contrails form a high altitude layer of ice crystals and greenhouse pollution, which allows light to pass through, but does not allow heat to bounce back out. Ironically, they do block some light too, which may be offsetting the observed effects of heating. It's like my old truck that used to have a bad leak in the front driver-side tire, and a front end in bad need of alignment. If the tire had 45 pounds in it, I couldn't keep the thing out of the ditch, but if I let it get down to about 15, I could take my hands off of the steering wheel and it would drive as straight as an arrow. One serious, dangerous condition was offsetting another, and creating the illusion that all was not as bad as it seemed when looking at only one problem at a time.

We need to get off oil, get out of the Middle East, develop wind/solar/hydrogen/electric, bring back trains and busses, and scrap private cars and jet travel except as an extremely expensive luxury for emergencies, and force consumers to go on a resource diet before it's too late. James Lovelock already believes it is too late http://tinyurl.com/cup3p. Read it, weep, and then stock up on lead, and start filling, gluing, and burying lengths of PVC pipe with everything you might want to have around for a few months when this whole balsa wood skyscraper we live in comes crashing down on our heads. I wouldn't sweat the terrorists right now. I'd sweat the actual sweat and that four hours worth of supply sitting on the grocery/hardware store shelves. LA after Rodney King and NO after Ms. Katrina were just dry runs for this coming cluster f#ck.

Doomsday Dan

A link to Dan's blog is posted to the right.

C25K:W7:D3

This morning was week seven, day three. Uneventful and not really worth mentioning. I won't bore you with the insipid graphs because they look so much like the last two, even though I varied the route a little.

Next week is 2.75 mile runs or 28 minutes. Since my 25 minute runs have been averaging just over three miles, my 28 minute runs will likely be just shy of 3.5 miles. Little by little, my distance is increasing. I think my hips are recovering though I still have some slight pain especially on the right side, but it's certainly not getting any worse.

C25K:W7:D2

This morning's run was the same as Sunday's run; 25 minutes or 2.5 miles. My footpod puts the distance I covered in 25 minutes at 2.7 miles, Google Earth puts it at 3.06 miles. I'm amazed at how easy it is to run for 25 minutes straight now. When I started, running for more than a handful of minutes at one time was difficult. I still have pain in my hips, but I think it's getting better.

I have two more weeks in the Couch-to-5K program and after that, I think I'll start with one of the routines in Galloway's Book On Running. It's the only running book I have... so far.

Graphs:

C-2-5K:W7:D1

Good run this morning. Couch-to-5K week seven day one (and days two and three) calls for 25 minutes of running. Though I've had a slight sensation of pain in my hip over the last couple of days, I decided I'd give it a go regardless. It was a beautiful morning. We had some light rain last night and the sky was filled with clouds when I set out.

I ran and attempted to record a podcast about Lawrence while I was out. I headed to Oak Hill Cemetery for the second time. I like running there. There are hundreds of interesting things to look at and no people around. And when you're talking about the history of Lawrence, what better surrounding could there be?

Here are the graphs:

C-2-5K:W6:D3 Take Two

I tried to run Couch-to-5K week six, day three on Monday, but my heart rate was way up in the 220s so I ended up walking for the better part of an hour.

This morning, I pulled it off with no problems. Twenty-five minutes of running, just under three miles. Here's the pictures:

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

I picked up this book about five years ago and like so many others, I started it and never finished it... Until a couple days ago. When I started it, I was amazed. It was incredibly good but I was a relatively new father and had just moved into a new house and I had to put it down. Until recently.

While I was at Black Hat Training this year, I picked up Michal Zalewski's Silence on the Wire. Zalewski is a world-reknowned information security personality who's work has inspired my own. I've looked for a copy of Zalewski's book, but our local bookstores have never had it on the shelf.

As I suspected, it's very good, but early in the book it presents some logic gate diagrams and then moves quickly into circuit diagrams for demonstrating how computers perform addition. I wasn't quite following Zalewski's presentation but knew I'd seen something like it before.

I went to the garage and started digging through boxes. I found Charles Petzold's Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software after a few minutes.

Bingo! I'd forgotten how good Petzold's Code is. It's a book about computers written for the layman. Petzold starts simply enough, two neighborhood kids who want to communicate with one another at night using flashlights. They go from trying to draw letters in the air, to using a binary code of dots and dashes, Morse Code.

Eventually, one of the neighbor kids moves away and a new kid takes his place, but his room is on the other side of the house and you have to find a new solution. Petzold breaks down the anatomy of the flashlight complete with loads of illustrations. He shows how the kids in the book could wire up switches and lights in their rooms and continue to communicate using Morse code.

Petzold moves into a full blown discussion of the history of the telegraph and the hardware that made it possible, complete with dozens of illustrations. Next there's a side discussion of number systems and alternatives to base 10 or the common decimal system that we all know and love. We are led on a journey that eventually demonstrates to us that we can convey lots of information using a binary number system consisting of only one and zero.

Petzold continues the journey with a tour of logic and telegraph relays can be used to build systems that mirror logic systems. Again loads of wonderful illustrations make this easily approachable. (The following image was lifted from http://juliankay.com/blog/index.php?nbp=blog1&nbi=342).

At last in chapter 12, Petzold puts together the relays and switches and builds an adding machine similar to the one Zalewski has in his book. From their we learn about subtraction, how computer memory is made from the same basic logic gates and on and on ending with a brief discussion of the Java computer language and it's concept of a virtual machine.

Code is a computer book like no other. It's truly amazing. If you're at all interested in knowing more about how computers work, Petzold's book is like a crash course in Computer Science but without the stuffed shirt professor looking down on your inferior intellect.

Having read Code from start to finish, I think I'm ready to get back to Silence on the Wire. I'm really looking forward to it and suspect it will be as good as Code, though it's a book about security. When I'm finsihed, I'll post a review... for what that's worth.

More material for the watch list

Any reasonable person who looks at the real facts knows that the U.S. war on drugs is a waste of money and has wrongly jailed hundreds of thousands of people over the last few decades. Now, Penn & Teller are joining the mix.

I've blogged about this issue before.