PicoBusiness

Oh Glory of Glories. Oh Heavenly Testament to the Eternal Majesty of God’s Creation.

(Homer Simpson)

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Apparently there’s a claim that you can’t “PR” (hit a personal record) in all three events in a given race. From a logical perspective, this is silly, and I blogged as such at BeginnerTriathlete.com:

Your logic “can’t PR in all three at once” is true if and only if you are already at your peak physical form. And in any other case, your post is far more discouraging than it might be to average “beginner” types.

For example, let’s say I’m a 36 year old man who has never done a triathlon, rarely runs, never bikes, never swims. I do some modest training, and during the race I struggle with the swim (have to backstroke for a while), do ok on the bike, and then struggle with the run (because I pushed too hard on the bike, and didn’t run enough intervals)

The next year, I do more outdoor running, a bit more biking and maintain my swimming. I do another triathlon and, it turns out, do better in all 3 events than in my first triathlon.

But still, I’m not satisfied. So I sign up for Beginner Triathlete, spend some money and put a lot more time and effort into my training - much longer swims, runs and bikes, at speed. I won’t know for a few weeks, but I expect that I will again beat my previous times in all three events.

But I’m still far, far below my theoretical maximum athletic ability. And as long as I’m not at my absolute 100% peak, there’s always a possibility of improving the times in all three sports.

If you’re at the point where you can’t seem to improve one event without sacrificing in another, congratulations - you are probably close to your physical maximum for the hours you are putting in.

Otherwise, you are absolutely capable of PRing in all three events in a given race.

From data discussed at Future Pundit, I created this chart of miles driven per person in the US.

Based on population data from April 2008 and Miles Driven from May 2008, we can come up with some interesting observations.

1. The miles driven per person estimate for May 2008 is slightly below 2002 levels:

2001: 9689.38

2002: 9806.25

2008: 9758.76 (Estimate)

2. Another interesting measurement - %-age change in miles driven vs. the previous year:

And what you’re seeing here is a steady and ongoing decrease in the “rate of growth” of driving over time. In other words, since 1990, our driving miles/year has been leveling off, despite a significant increase in population.

3. Which suggests the graph - changes in population vs. changes in driving year-over-year:

Which shows that the population growth has been a steady 1% per year. In the go-go 80s, we increased our mileage more than the population growth, and for the 90s through 2005 we roughly aligned our driving to the population, and since 2005 we’ve been driving less relative to population.

Source Data:

Population

1980 – 1990 http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/1990s/nat-total.txt

1990 – 2000 http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/EST90INTERCENSAL/US-EST90INT-07/US-EST90INT-07.csv

2000 – 2007 http://www.census.gov/popest/states/NST-ann-est.html

2008 http://www.census.gov/popest/national/NA-EST2007-01.html

Driving

1983-2008 http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/tvtw/tvtpage.htm

(Spoilers, don’t keep reading if you haven’t seen either movie)

Origin

Joker 89 - set up by his boss over a woman.
Joker 08 - Unknown

Winner: Joker 08

Smile

Joker 89 - courtesy of shrapnel and a hack surgeon
Joker 08 - Unknown, possibly self-inflicted

Winner: Joker 08

Style

Joker 89 - dapper and dashing in custom-tailored purple suits
Joker 08 - unkempt and probably quite smelly

Winner: Joker 89

Scariness

Joker 89 - dapper and dashing in custom-tailored purple suits
Joker 08 - unkept, unpredictable and diabolically clever

Winner: Joker 08

Gadgets

Joker 89 - toxic makeup, parade balloons and Prince music
Joker 08 - knives, ammonium nitrate and cellphones

Winner: Joker 89

Plots

Joker 89 - poison celebrities who wear too much makeup, and arrange for people to poison themselves in the streets
Joker 08 - retrieve the chinese banker for the mob from police custody, and demonstrate to Batman that the people of Gotham are not civilized enough to justify his devotion to them.

Winner: Joker 08

How He Meets His End

Joker 89 - apparently dead from a fall, although the body on the ground does not have any blood on his face.
Joker 08 - locked up in Arkham, certain to escape and terrorize Gotham again.

Winner: Joker 08

Thinking Ahead

Joker 89 - took over the TV stations, avoided the batmobile explosion
Joker 08 - Got himself and a bomb into deep police custody, anticipated the route and timing of the prisoner transfer, cleverly disguised hostages as terrorists, and anticipated the use of ferries to transport innocent people and criminals at the same time.

Winner: Joker 08

Total: 6 to 2 in favor of Joker 08

People sometimes ask why I don’t like public schools, etc. And there are a lot of reasons, involving lack of accountability, significant liberal bias, misplaced incentives and pro-government dogma presented as facts.

The most compelling reason, however, simply has to do with the fact that government school systems have a lot of power, and when the wrong person has control of that power, bad things happen.

I know, you look at this article and say to yourself “Yes, that was a bad thing, but it was an isolated incident.”

The problem is that those “isolated incidents” are occurring all the time, all over the country. As we (the people) give more power to the school systems and the administrators, we make the administrative positions more attractive to unscrupulous, immoral people who will happily abuse these positions to enrich themselves.

I know, a lot of times, people who want to give school systems more power do so with only the best of intentions. But just like deciding to turn to the dark side of the Force to save your wife from a painful death in childbirth, in the end, it’s just a bad idea.

(hat tip: TJICstan)

Hee hee. The music is the best touch.

(Spoilers!)

In reviewing some of the feedback on The Dark Knight, I struggle with some of the ideas that are floating around:

Below the fold, if you want to read further.

(more…)

My two favorites:

Whole list here

Coyote and TJIC are discussing famous people they’ve run into. Here’s my list:

• Matt Groening
• Douglas Adams
• Jeff Bezos
• Michael Dell
• Sinbad
• John Doerr
• Bob Barr
• Vinod Khosla
• Ester Dyson (in two different times and places)
• Cory Doctorow
• Violet Blue
• Bob Metcalfe
• Dan Bricklin
• Bob Frankstone

Oh, and I met Walter Cronkite as well, but I was only 6 months old at the time.

Many of these are lame, but this one is pretty good:

From a Woot product contest (Combine a Woot product and an album cover)

Comments (0)

Greg Mankiw quotes:

People who make less than $20,000 a year, for instance, spent more than a third of their time in passive leisure, like kicking back and watching TV. By contrast, those making more than $100,000 a year (I would call them affluent, not wealthy), spent less than a fifth of their time in passive leisure.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find “passive leisure” to be very much fun. Active leisure for me - playing interactive computer games, exercising, developing software, writing, reading blogs - those are my leisurely pursuits.