May 31
lindsayrgwattNYC running
Yesterday I ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon. I like to joke that I wanted to put the 3.1 back into 13.1 (it was my 31st birthday and a half-marathon is 13.1 miles).
However, it was really because I wanted to complete the Grand Prix: the five half marathons that are run in each of New York’s boroughs. Last year I ran the other four, but I missed Brooklyn as Wen and I were away that weekend. Hence, this year, it had to happen.
Unfortunately, I haven’t really been training much this year. Plus yesterday was a really humid day (75% humidity). All of this meant that I got reacquainted to my friend “The Wall“. Through the magic of technology, I can show you roughly the exact distance at which he returned:
This graph shows my pace (minutes/kilometer) over the 21 km of the race. The data come from my Garmin ForeRunner (the data’s not smooth as the GPS connection occasionally disappears and the Garmin software is terrible).
The six big spikes: that’s when I had to stop to walk. Three times it was due to the fact that I was getting water (I’m still dehydrated 36 hours later) and three times it was because I was so exhausted that I thought I might just keel over.
Sadly, I did see some people keel over. The last kilometer of the race was along the Coney Island boardwalk; at one point I looked over and saw that a spectator was in fact a racer vomiting all over the ground.
Further down the boardwalk, three men stood in the middle of the course and my glycogen-starved brain thought they were the world’s most obnoxious tourists posing for a photograph. When I got closer, I realized that it was two locals holding up a guy who had collapsed from the humidity a mere couple of hundred of meters from the finish line.
Speaking of the finish, it was right in front of the old Parachute Jump; a grand landmark to signal the end of the race:
Here are some other random notes from the race:
- There were 11,800 people in the race; you were surrounded by people the entire way
- According the Marty Moscowitz, the borough president who started the race, 1 in 8 Americans can trace their history to Brooklyn. Also, if Brooklyn were a city, it would be the fourth-largest in America
- The race shut down Ocean Parkway, causing a few irate drivers. There’s got to be a business in creating an SMS service alerting drivers to upcoming road closures. Cities would input road closures and people could subscribe to be notified of closures in certain areas. The service would be free to end users and the city would pay for it. Could be interesting
May 20
lindsayrgwattUncategorized discovery, iphone, itunes, Music, recommendations
Over the past few months, I’ve been trying a little experiment and it’s worked quite well. In my own truly nerdy way, I’ve been ranking almost every some I listen to on my iPhone/iPod and listening to each song until the very end.
Why? Well, now I’ve got a list of my favourite, most listened-to songs. This gives me the ability to do a couple of cool things:
1) I’ve set up my iPhone so that it only contains the most recent 150 songs I’ve bought plus any song that is at least four stars. Now, when I’m on the go, I only listen to new and/or good music
2) I also use Apple’s Genius feature a lot on my iPhone. It’s fascinating to see what pops up as a recommendation. Some of my songs consistently cluster together whereas others bridge distinct genres. It’s almost become a game to figure out which songs can create the best playlists.
This experience is totally different from using Genius on my laptop. I have 10x more music on my laptop, so the Genius playlists are much more homogenous; it’s only on my iPhone where I see a bit of serendipity.
3) I’ve also created a playlist of songs that are rated at least four stars but haven’t been listened to for 90 days. It’s like coming home to an old friend (just kidding)
4) I’ve another playlist of songs sorted by play count. It’s a quick and dirty way to guarantee that I can find a song that I know I’ll like
There is one downfall to this experiment: if a tune doesn’t get four stars quickly, it is doomed to be unlistened forever. Assuming my tastes don’t shift (an unlikely assumption) this should be fine, but I’d like to think I can re-discover my older music or allow albums to grow on me over time.
I’ll have to set up the next experiment to work on that…
May 15
lindsayrgwattNYC, Random recession
Ah, looks like my neighbourhood’s economy is not holding up too well in this recession.
Evidence A: our billboards are being reduced to ads for dueling strip clubs:
Evidence B: a local woman is offering to clean your apartment – in the near-buff:
Looks like it might be a while to a recovery…
May 12
lindsayrgwattNYC, Random poetry
If the toilets of the bars, restaurants and offices of New York are to be believed, they are under constant assault from a plague of paper towel throwers. A frequent sign of recent intruders is a plea from the toilet to spare it. I was particularly moved by this one’s haiku:
May 10
lindsayrgwattFinance, Science Complexity, Economics, physics
This weekend I walked into a gallery on 21st street and saw this sculpture:
This photo captures the components of the system, but not the dynamics of it. Basically, you’re looking at two fans facing each other and connected by four pieces of fishing line. Around the fishing line are wrapped two circular streamers of magnetic tape.
This is fundamentally a simple system – the fans provide continuous input – but the outcome is unbelievably complex. The two streamers bounce back and forth between the two fans. At time they appear to stand still and then wildly gyrate in a new direction. At no time can you predict where they are going to go next, nor do they ever take the same path twice.
This art installation is a fantastic visual example of what is talked about in a recent paper, The (Unfortunate) Complexity of the Economy, by Jean-Phillipe Bouchaud. Bouchaud shreds the notion that our economy can be explained simply by supply and demand. Instead, he outlines how many of the behaviours we see in our economy (bubbles, markets that never settle on an equilibrium, etc.) can be explained by different physical analogues. For example, the fans above are an example of a system that is incredibly sensible to the slightest perturbation in its environment, meaning that is constantly and dramatically changing state (sound like the stock market of late ‘08/early ‘09?). What’s more, the system above is also governed by few simple actions (fans blow a tape wrapped around strings) yet incredibly complex action resuls (think about many people buying/selling a stock, yet prices gyrate madly).
If you read one academic paper this year, make it this one.
May 09
lindsayrgwattRandom Design, movie, objectified
Last night Wen & I went and saw Objectified, Gary Hustwit’s new movie documenting how the best designers in the world create new, desirable objects.
He’s interviewed the leading luminaries in the business – Jonathan Ives, Dieter Rams, Karim Rashid, Naoto Fukasawa, everybody at Ideo, Marc Newson, the Bouroullec brothers, etc. – and they shed their thoughts on how it’s done.
It’s an illuminating story – one of the most memorable scenes is Fukasawa describing how he created a phone to have faceted faces so that you’d want to touch it. He talks about how we subconsciously play with the phones in our pockets – and he wanted to create a phone that would encourage you to do this without thinking. His philosophy is that great “design dissolves into behaviour.”
The movie is great, although it occasionally feels like some of the designers are great posers. Some credibly talk about the philosophy of how they create objects (notably Fukusawa, Ives, Rams and Rashid), with an emphasis on solving people’s problems with the simplest of designs. However, some of the other designers let slip that “we just threw the buttons on it” or something similar, undermining the attempts of their peers to demonstrate that there might be a science behind their art.
The other unnerving element of the movie comes when Paolo Antonelli suggests that she would like to see designers as the new intellectuals consulted by government whenever there is a public policy issue. Something about this just doesn’t feel right, and it is demonstrated by a scene where a bunch of Ideo staffers try to re-imagine the toothbrush. The team spends a few days trying to imagine the future of oral care and create a toothbrush with a lower environmental impact. The result of the drill is a new toothbrush with a replaceable head: a product that will almost certainly never make it to market.
It won’t make it to market, not because it’s a bad product, but because it does not recognize that reducing the environmental impact of a toothbrush isn’t just about building a better product. It’s about consumer behaviour: how do you change user’s behaviour when the current toothbrush satisfices; it’s about supply chains: how do you sell this product and get it distributed. The overwhelming sense was that these designers don’t scale: they can create beautiful products but when it came to addressing world-changing issues, they naively assume that a perfect product will sell itself (if the history of the computer industry has taught us nothing else, it’s that better products alone do not suffice – check out the Mac and the Xerox Alto).
Despite this, I highly recommend seeing the movie as it is entertaining and engaging. Also, if you live in NYC, a lot of the stock footage is shot here and it’s alway fun to see your city in a new light.
May 08
lindsayrgwattNYC, Random ad, perceptual illusion
Over the past few days I’ve noticed these billboards around the neighbourhood:
It’s just blood on the floor, right? Oh, wait… I’m a sucker for these perceptual illusions, here’s an explanation for why they work.
PS If all you see is blood, add a comment and I’ll tell you what to look for…
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