Base writing

So concludes 2010 for Just Enough Craig. I've decided to take a break from blogging for the entirety of January to refill my imagination and spirit and will resume in February. In the meantime, I leave you with my memory of a dream from two nights ago.

In it, I was running along a street and passed a parked sedan with Texas license plates. Nearby were a man and a woman, and to them I hailed with with a “Yea, Texas!” They then asked me if I was from Texas, and I responded that I was. I then found myself, via that blurry transition that happens only in dreams, no longer running but stopped and in conversation with the two.

“Where in Texas are you from?” they asked.

“Houston,” I said.

“Oh, we're from Katy. Is that anywhere near Houston?”

“Uh, yeah. It's probably going to be annexed by Houston any year now,” I said sarcastically.

“Oh. Well, we're not really from Katy. But we had you going, huh?”

Indeed they did. Strange how the mind cons itself even in its own dreamworlds.

2010, in review

While last year marked an unusually high frequency of falling off my bicycle—what with getting hit by a car twice, crashing within a race once, endo-ing into the transition area in a triathlon once, and falling off at least two or three more times with no one around to notice—this year I managed to avoid crashes altogether. However, the year wasn't without accidents; one can still have a bike accident while remaining fully mounted.

The first accident came on a Saturday long ride during spring when a lone dog herded me to a stop and then, in a flash, came up beside me and bit my leg. No provocation, just a darn sneaky attack. The bite required me making a stop at the med clinic and left me with a indelible dog-teeth tattoo on my left leg just above the ankle. Supposedly in another year I'll know for sure that I don't have rabies. If, during that time, I begin foaming at the mouth, don't come too close.

The details surrounding the second accident are a little hazy in my mind, possibly owing to the aforementioned dog attack. Not long after that dog attack, maybe even the following weekend, while riding with Laura on the Cave Creek bike path, I suffered a golf ball attack. On the portion of the path that runs parallel to the golf course, I just happened to ride my bike into the path of an errantly struck golf ball. Admittedly, this attack was no big deal because the ball took a few hops on the ground before striking me, so the blow was hardly painful. But what are the odds? I suppose the answer to that question depends on the golfer.

What I remember being interesting about the golf ball attack was how time really did seem to slow down as it happened, just like in the movies. I first heard the solid thud of the ball hitting the ground, followed by my eyes locking in on the ball and my mind realizing that the ball was headed right exactly in my direction. Little league baseball fielding skills did not take over as I flinched futilely, failing to evade the ball as it took one final “bad hop” and entered onto a trajectory that had it go right between my flailing hands and hit me square in the chest. I think I saved that golfer a stroke plus distance, and I didn't even get a “thank you.”

This year most of my riding was recreational rather than utilitarian, but I did get to see some interesting urban “wildlife”: a four-foot snake crossing the road (so close I may have even ridden over it!) on the way home from work late one night; a seven-inch-long turtle ambling in the grass along the canal path; and a dead, bloated fish lying on the dirt mere feet from the canal water. That fish was probably about thirty inches long, and I have the photo to prove it! The smell was awful, especially considering it took the SRP guys three or four days to get around to disposing of it.

I also got to see a drowned car in the canal. Someone presumably pushed a car into the shallow water, and predictably the top of the car didn't submerge before the tires parked themselves on the bottom. What remained was the top twelve inches or so of a sedan, unmoving amid the nearby ducks and fellow-drowned shopping carts (and other debris) along the canal floor. I saw the car on my way to work in the morning. By the time I arrived, police and towing crew were already there on the scene.

In non-biking news, this year I had two resolutions, and I succeeded with both of them.

1. Watch no more than two movies in the movie theater.

2. Blog each Monday and Thursday.

The movie-limit resolution I came up with in order to cut down on passive entertainment expenses (both in time and money) as well as simply cutting back on my Hollywood addiction. The regular-blogging resolution I came up about a month into the year, thus making it something of a post ex facto resolution. No bother. It was a worthy goal, and with the exception of messing up the auto-post scheduler when I was in Houston for the Thanksgiving holiday and thus being late one Monday, I succeeded in my goal. Hurray to me.

Looking forward to the future, as far as blogging goes, I aim to respond to each and every reader comment on Just Enough Craig in 2011. I won't guarantee any timeliness of the response, and I won't guarantee the quality of the response's content, but I will respond.

That's the JEC wrap-up for 2011. All in all, it was another good year.

Base sleeping

Though the alarm clock that guarantees I'm up and awake in time for my Tuesday and Thursday morning ride—which I shirked this morning in favor of staying dry instead—springs to life just as precisely on-time and blares just as loud during the dark and cold winter months, I consider myself something of a seasonal sleeper. That is, I aim to adjust my sleeping pattern over the course of the year to coincide, somewhat, with the lengthening and shortening of the days.

In endurance training there's the concept of base training. Its basic idea is simple: train easy and allow the body time to recover while remaining plenty active. Elite athletes, the ones who train inconceivably hard for much of the year, sometimes do base training and only base training for months at a time during the off season; their bodies need that much rest after the demands of the racing season are done. I look at sleeping in a similar manner; let's call it base sleeping.

The basic idea of base sleeping is simple: during summer, when the days are long, it's generally okay to push the body through times of little sleep; during winter, when the days are short, it's best then to recover, to go to sleep a little earlier at night and awake a little later in the morning.

My primary premise for base sleeping is thatle it's easier to fall asleep when light input to the retinas is kept to a minimum—i.e., when it's dark. It follows then, without modern light-emitting technology to which homo sapiens is not yet fully adapted, winter is the time for more sleeping and summer is the timer for less. My own personal preference, excluding the Tuesday and Thursday alarm clock and the other need-to-wake-up-by-this-time mornings, is to avoid the alarm clock altogether and consequently to settle into the pattern of waking up around the time of the day's first light. At night, my preference, excluding the too-frequent last-minute cranking out of a JEC blog post or some other such illumination-needed activity, is to keep the lights dim and naturally fall asleep not long after the sun is done for the day—within reason. This is one of the reasons why I enjoy camping. Not only do I get to enjoy my preference nearly spot on, but even the type of people who, upon reading this essay and insist that, no, they don't feel much natural tie to the daylight rhythms of the seasons, more often than not find themselves retiring to the sack not long after the sunset. There's a unique peacefulness of a camp settling down for quiet sleep in accord with sun and earth, and it gives me joy to be a part of it. However, my preference does not match up well with modern convention. Laura, I'll admit, is far from sold on my philosophy of sleep.

Convention, at least among most of the working-stiff middle class, tells us that we should be waking up about the same time year-round, weekends and other days-off being the exception. Convention tells us that regardless whether first daylight arrives before 5AM or after 7AM, we should show up to work at about the same time. Afternoon and evening scheduling, from indoor get-togethers to what's playing on television, suggests that regardless whether it's first dark outside at 6PM or 8PM, our evening and nightly routines should be about the same year-round. In my opinion, this is absurd. It's also not how our ancestors lived until only very recently, as in the last few centuries.

Though it's gaining traction as of late, the history of sleep is not something we hear much about, which is strange given how so many people in modern, industrialized societies have trouble doing it. Pre-industrial sleep patterns are actually rather different from modern norms. Absent those light-emitting devices, from the ubiquitous light bulb to my laptop's LCD monitor that's inundating my retinas with photons right now as I type this, most people feel a strong desire for sleep soon after the day's light fades away, regardless whether the day is a long summer day or a short winter one. Similarly, most people, absent alarm clocks and those light-emitting devices, feel little need to awake much if any before the next day's first light. But during the winter the dark of night may last well over half the twenty-four-hour day. How did pre-industrialized people sleep so long?

The answer is that often they didn't. Adults often awoke sometime around the middle of night, say around midnight, and stayed awake for up to a few hours before returning to the mat to slumber away the remaining hours of the night. During that wakeful period at night, people were alert and active, getting done many of the things for which they had not enough time to do during the daylight hours. Such a sleeping pattern is called biphasic sleep.

The history of sleep is an interesting one. Still, the fact remains that we are an industrialized people, and we enjoy our light-emitting devices, and it then follows that perhaps we should have a different pattern of sleep. However, I reject the notion that our light-emitting devices have completely smoothed over all the natural, year-long fluctuations in sleeping rhythms and that we should seek a one-day-fits-all pattern to the whole year. I find base sleeping to be a good compromise.

Turning the corner

Several years ago, while visiting my friend Kaleem in Houston, I was afforded my first (and, to this day, only) opportunity to step inside a mosque. Our purpose for our visit was that Kaleem wanted to participate in the mosque's evening prayer, and I would get a chance to see his place of worship.

While Kaleem and his fellow mosque-goers prayed, I, the infidel, remained in the mosque's entry hall, examining the various bulletins and postings on the walls and otherwise biding my time. The bulletins were all pretty typical “church” sorts of stuff, with various community notices and the like, until I saw a chart of sunrise and sunset times for the whole year. My interest piqued.

Muslim prayer times are scheduled according to the sun's position, with one of the daily salah prayers taking place at sunrise and another taking place at sunset. Thus, it's handy for a Muslim to have available a chart of sunrise and sunset times so that he can plan his day more easily. I found the chart handy because I noticed a peculiar detail I had never before realized about our earth: the earliest sunset of the year occurs (in the Northern Hemisphere) weeks before the winter solstice, and the latest sunrise occurs weeks after the solstice. I.e., sunrises and sunsets are not symmetrical over the moment of the solstice. Why is this?

Tomorrow, in Phoenix, as in most timezones in the Northern Hemisphere, is this year's winter solstice. You can get into the winter mood and stump many of your friends at the same time by asking when the earliest sunset and latest sunrise occurs in the year. Some will probably not believe you initially when you factually and correctly answer that the earliest sunset occurred in the first week of December and many will probably not believe you when you state that the latest sunrise of the year occurred over eleven months ago (i.e., during the first week of January), but there you have it. But why?

Answering this question takes the asker on a wonderful trip of examining how our world hurls through space. As most people know, most of the length of a day is determined by the axial tilt of the planet away or towards the sun. During summer, one's hemisphere tilts towards the sun, and the days are long. During winter, the hemisphere tilts away from the sun, and the days are short. So far, so good. But why don't sunrises and sunsets match up precisely with day lengths?

The answer is that there are additional factors. Mainly, there's one additional factor that matters at the scales we care about, and that's the distance from the earth to the sun. Causing no end of confusion and frustration to the ancients, the earth does not orbit the sun in a perfect circle but instead follows an elliptical orbit whereby the earth happens to be nearest to the sun during the Northern Hemisphere's winter and farthest from the sun during the Northern Hemisphere's summer. (The earth is nearest and farthest from the sun at its perihelion and aphelion, respectively, with the perihelion occurring in the first week in January and the aphelion occurring in the first week in July—so close to the solstices.)

What matters for timekeeping here on earth is that the earth moves through space fastest (relative to the sun) at its perihelion and slowest at its aphelion, just as a comet zips quickly around the sun at its perigee and dawdles in the cold of space at its apogee, just as a baseball thrown high in the air moves fastest when it is nearest to the ground and slowest at the top of its arc. But while comets have highly elliptical orbits and change speeds drastically, the earth's orbit is much less eccentric, with the result that the difference between the fastest and slowest of the earth's orbital velocities is only about 3%. But what does this have to do with timekeeping?

There's another great question, related to all this, with which to stump your friends: how many times does the earth rotate in a given year? The obvious answer is 365 rotations with 366 on leap year—i.e., the number of days in a year. However, the correct answer is 366 rotations with 367 on leap year; one rotation is “lost” during the earth's revolution around the sun. You can act this out to see for yourself by finding some object, such as a chair or tree, with cleared space all around it to play the part of the sun and you, walking fully around the object, to play the part of the earth. Only, walk such that you always face one direction, say north. After completing one revolution around the sun, you will have rotated exactly zero times, though you will have simulated one day/night cycle because part of the time you will have faced the sun and part of the time you will have faced away from the sun. Thus, the number of rotations a planet undergoes is always one greater or fewer by one than the number of noons or midnights that that planet experiences; in the earth's case, it happens to be one greater.

What this has to do with timekeeping and sunrises and sunsets is that while the earth takes a fixed amount of time to complete one full rotation, it takes a variable amount of time to complete what we observe as a day—except that nowadays we define a day to be 24 hours long. The length of a solar day, the amount of time between the sun being at its highest point in the sky from one day to the next day, varies by up to a few minutes throughout the year, depending on one's latitude. During the Northern Hemisphere's winter solstice, the solar day is a little longer. Thus, both the sunrise and sunset are each offset a little later, as measured by a 24-hour clock, than they would be otherwise, if the earth orbited along a perfect circle. Thus it is that the sunrises and sunsets don't match up precisely with the day lengths.

The practical effect of this is that while tomorrow marks the year's winter solstice (for the Northern Hemisphere) and the shortest day of the year, we have about another two weeks to go before arriving at what I think of as the more significant of the astronomical events—what I call “turning the corner”, the day of the latest sunrise. Only after that day, occurring in the first week of January each year here in Phoenix, do my morning bicycle rides begin lighting up a little brighter each day.

Salvage

Ever since my touring bicycle was stolen, I've been riding my old fixed-gear Schwinn Tempo for utility rides, such as getting to and from work and the grocery store—though one is, of course, free to question the utility of going to work. And riding the Schwinn has reminded me how, with a little effort and know-how, old road bikes remain great rides and how fixed-gear bicycles are fun rides and, most importantly of all, that one needn't spend a lot of money to get around town in comfort and ease and to participate in the city's great network of bike routes.

It's not just that one needn't spend a lot on transportation; having my bike stolen taught me that one shouldn't spend a lot on transportation—or at least not its utilitarian forms. Locking up a bicycle in a seedy public location is semi-stupid when that bicycle costs on the order of $1000. Chop a zero off that figure, and one can afford to have one bicycle stolen per month and still manage to spend less on transportation than motorists do and even the motorists who buy cheap and drive their cars into the ground.

Awhile ago, I wrote about how the fuel costs of bicycling and motoring are not that greatly different. Kilocalorie for kilocalorie, gasoline remains some of the cheapest food on the planet and far cheaper than anything humans can digest. Bicycling pulls slightly ahead of motoring with regard to fuel costs because with bicycling the transportation machine itself weighs literally a ton or more less, and far less energy is needed to move a bicycle than an automobile, mile for mile.

However, fuel costs are but a fraction of one's transportation costs and especially so for motoring. There are also depreciation, maintenance, and insurance costs. At the time I rid myself of my car, I figured car ownership cost me about $2k/yr, all things considered. As it happens, I spend much more than this on bicycling, but that has to do with racing and training and all my non-utilitarian bicycling pursuits. Actual utility pursuits of bicycling needn't be greater than a couple hundred dollars for depreciation and maintenance and, frankly, I figure most people would gladly pay $2k/yr to be able to eat 3,000-5,000 kcal daily and be my size. This is to say that measuring fuel costs in money alone doesn't do bicycling justice.

Also, my estimation of $2k/yr for car ownership is rather cheap compared to most people's car-ownership costs. Most car owners pay at least $2k/yr for depreciation alone: e.g., a $20k car owned for 10 years. Figuring that a lot of middle-class people pay more for their cars, own them for less time, drive them more miles and consume more gas than I did, and have more serious mechanical problems than I ever did, one begins to see how much of a racket transportation can be. A lot of folks' paychecks are largely redirected right back to paying for the machine that they use to go to work each morning.

Though I've been car-free for a little over two years and car-light if you consider that Laura owns a car (and takes the bus to work most mornings!), I was suckered into my own transportation racket by riding my too-nice touring bicycle around town for utility trips. Transportation is about (1) getting to where you're going and (2) having fun doing so. I don't speak for others when I say that, for me, any right-sized, well maintained road bike makes accomplishing #2 automatic. That leaves #1 and my recently relearned lesson that a cheap bike can work just as well as an expensive bike. I think the key word for accomplishing #1 is salvage. I ended up riding too much bike around town because I garnered expectations as to what my bicycle should be. I became particular about my method for accomplishing #1. Now, I'm riding my Schwinn not because it's the bike I want to be riding but because it's the bike that was easily and cheaply available at the time my other bicycle was stolen. If my Schwinn is stolen from me, too, then I'll replace it with whatever happens to be easily and cheaply available at that time. Salvage.

Except the saddle. There's nothing quite like the comfort of riding around town with butt atop a well made leather saddle. I question my judgment when I lock my Schwinn to a bike rack and leave my saddle exposed to theft. Perhaps instead I should be locking my saddle to the bike rack and exposing my bicycle to theft?

Thoughts after a half marathon

Staring out the car window at the Sonoran landscape blurring by, some things were brought into sharper focus.

I'm fortunate that Laura and I both enjoy our camping + racing routine. Money alone would be a good enough reason to combine the two activities; races are unduly expensive. The half marathon in which we participated this previous weekend cost about $80 each. Triathlons, with their need for additional support and their longer, multi-discipline courses encompassing water and land both, tend to cost more. Only some local, “pure” cycling races are cheap, and by “pure” I mean races where your team is suppose to provide you your support and the whole event is relegated to middle-of-nowhere places where it hardly matters whether the roads are closed to public traffic during the race. (They're not.) As it is, most other races cost a pretty penny, and so it's good when one must travel to compete to save on hotel expenses by rooming in what nature affords each and every one of us.

But, of course, money isn't the only reason for camping on race weekends. Camping provides another benefit over hotel-ing, and that's adversity. Even on weekends like this last one, when we stay in a park with designated campgrounds (and for a fee), your bed is not made for you. The air is neither temperature- nor moisture-controlled, though more often than not Arizona weather is conducive for being in the outdoors. Instead, simple, routine acts like finding a spot for the tent, erecting it, and breaking it down in the morning are activities that foster a sense of teamwork. Cuddling together for warmth in the cool, desert night air hints at some of nature's basic reasons for keeping such a close distance to another. In the everything-is-predictable environment of the hotel, it's easy to nitpick against he or she with whom you're sharing your space because negativity is a luxury afforded only to those whose goings are easy. And though camping is sometimes easy, it requires hands and head both to be put to work and makes for a more positive atmosphere.

So, as I was staring out that car window on the way back to Phoenix, I couldn't help but entertain a contrary thought: how important is the racing part of the camping + racing formula? Now, before the world is painted in black and white and all things are subjected to a sophomoric duality, let me make clear that despite whatever criticism I'm about to unleash on them, races are positive events that help direct a great many people from otherwise pursuing self-damaging activities. Probably at this point nearly everyone knows someone who turned their life around by discovering running or triathlon or some other competitive racing. So racing has definite positive points.

Rather, what I question is what I've written about previously: balance. Where is the healthy point somewhere between unhealthy disinterest and unhealthy obsession? As I looked out that car window, I wondered about what I'm missing while I whittle away weekends pursuing long rides and base miles and edging ever closer to being a competitive age grouper. I live in one of the most amazing places on the planet, mere hours away from what is for practical purposes an endless supply of unique, fantastic places to explore and experience, and it seems likelier than not that I'm not taking advantage.

Training produces a material effect not much different than does any other material pursuit. Just as it can be difficult to part with a physical object once obtained (so named the endowment effect, such as how a dog is likely to fight harder for a bone once tasted than an equal bone as yet untasted), hard exercise yields as its fruit one of life's most satisfying physical objects: a fit body, the one physical object that you take with you everywhere you go. For those of us who do indeed observe immediate and gratifying changes in our bodies owing to exercise, it can be extremely hard to let go of. And it shouldn't be let go of, not all the way. Pleasure is one tool with which we are equipped to pursue a good life. But pleasure can mislead, as any number of substance-abuse problems demonstrate aptly.

But just like any other unnecessary physical object, it's all too easy to overestimate the benefit of and underestimate the maintenance cost of a racing-fit body. What I tell myself is that racing is not an anytime pursuit. As one ages, one eventually reaches one's peak potential and begins a terminal decline. Arguably, our peaks, as measured in potential and not in actual fact, occurs sometime in our mid-twenties, and I'm thus well past mine. However, what I know is that while I continue to train hard now, I continue to progress and improve (probably owing to having sat out much of my early twenties). After spending the previous couple of years dedicating a goodly portion of my life to training, progression and improvement is slowing down and a lot. Eventually, they will flatten completely and reverse, a trend that will be made obvious by universal access to race results on the Web. Hopefully, at the least, by such time I will have found an appropriate balance.

HOP

4:05AM. Alarm. Wake up. By now I know the routine well: food, water, clothes, and toilet. In the cool December mornings the “clothes” part takes more time: base layer, outer layer, balaclava, two pairs of gloves, booties. I prepared the bike the night before, and it's ready with tires pumped and lights and Garmin charged. In just under 30 minutes, I'm out the door, and though chilled by the cool morning air rushing past me, I'm in my own separate peace with headlights filling the void in front and taillight beaconing behind me.

I ride past the sleeping mall and turn onto the canal path, which will take me to my old area of town. About a thousand heartbeats along the way I warm up, and my legs enter into a steady rhythm. My mind enters into a happy, semi-unconscious state where miles are eaten up and time passes mostly unfelt. Awhile later, I turn off the path and cut through an exclusive neighborhood. Staffed guard shacks block my preferred route, and I'm forced to climb up around the long way and then descend down. Going uphill is hot and well lit; descending is a cold plunge into darkness, with my bike continuously outrunning its own headlights.

I continue snaking through neighborhoods until I reach Camelback Mountain. My destination is on the other side of the Mountain—which way to go? A check of the time tells me that I have extra time this morning, so I turn right and head the long way around. Because I have lots of extra time, I choose the route that involves a short though steep switchback. Then I shoot down a straightaway like a missile and easy-pedal the remaining mile to my destination. Some fifteen-plus miles through a Phoenix with mostly everyone still asleep in bed, I'm ready to begin my ride.

The Hour of Power bicycle ride soldiers on through these cold and dark months every Tuesday and Thursday at 5:30AM, like a stolid refusal to acknowledge the seasons. However, the ride is small, with usually no more than half a dozen riders on any one morning, and sometimes the group is just oneself. This morning the group starts out as two and picks up four more or so along the way. It's a good turnout for December, but even so there's no hiding within the group this morning, and it proves to be a tough workout.

Our route is the same as it is during the summer, the Paradise Valley loop. At the end we turn around and do some of it again in reverse, also just like in summer. I have no idea how long this ride has been going on; even guys who have been doing it for a decade have no idea how the whole thing started. It's a short route suitable for a weekday morning, no farther than the route I took to arrive at the ride. And I'm reminded it's a weekday morning just as I part ways with the others to head back home alone. At this time the first gray hints of the new day are emerging in the east, and like clockwork the cars have begun spilling onto the roads. Gone is the separate peace of the city still asleep.

Spare thoughts

Lately at work I find myself enjoying the too-rare rare opportunity of just coding. With nothing and nobody in my way, I have a straightforward release goal that's feasible and interesting. The feasibility part I figured out last week by making sure that everything that needs to be done can be done. Now what's left is the part I find most interesting: organizing my thoughts into something clear and concise and creating something elegant. This is what draws many software developers to our jobs: the joy of getting paid to solve fun problems. For me and my current, two-week project, it feels like seeing a finish line off in the distance and having the fresh legs to sprint ahead for a strong finish.

Hopefully this weekend's “real life” activities will go similarly well. Laura and I will be running in the Tucson Half Marathon, so we'll be doing our camp + race out-of-town routine. For Laura, this is her “comeback” half after dealing with a prolonged set of various over-training injuries most of the year. For me, this will be my second half and the first for which I'm at least semi-prepared. Unlike for my previous half marathon, for which I ran no farther than five or six miles on any training run and no more than about thirty miles in all, this time I've trained somewhat respectably, with a long run each weekend. On Thanksgiving Morning I ran a flat ten-mile race with tired legs and managed a 6:48/mile pace. This puts me at a faster clip than my minimum goal to break 1:30 for the half but not by much. The race course is downhill almost the whole way, and a better pre-race prep should help. On the other hand, I haven't found any information on which starting wave I'll be in, so I'm worried I won't be up at the front with runners my own speed and might have to work through the mid-pace masses. We'll see…

With all the “pure” running training I've been doing lately, I've become interested in trying out a lighter shoe, like the Vibram Five Fingers. Apparently, a lifetime (or partial lifetime) of walking and running in shoes that support and cushion our feet cause our feet—surprise!—to weaken. I was talking about this with my dad while home this Thanksgiving break (later, after the race), and he mentioned how he recently discovered that his arches have flattened out after six decades of use while his frequently barefooted brother-in-law a decade his senior still has well arched feet. On the other hand, still-in-his-twenties Coworker Shafik has recently caused himself knee problems by running in Five Fingers because his foot was absorbing shock in a suboptimal way and the minimalist shoe wasn't compensating, thus leading to an overstressed knee.

So what to do? Wear over-supporting shoes and lose my arches slowly or force my feet to toughen up and possibly cause damage faster? This raises an interesting point that arises in a multitude of scenarios: there's hardly a technology out there that doesn't involve a trade-off. No free lunch. (And if you don't perceive a trade-off, then it's likely that you're not looking hard enough.) If nothing else, the use-it-or-lose-it factor too often creates a serious downside to technologies that otherwise would make our lives go better in all cases.

Now that I'm a little older, I try to keep the perspective that the goal is to get the most out of the body by whatever means possible. Just as some people say that it's best to die just after having spent one's last dollar, I think the ideal is to die just before the body breaks down and begins having serious problems from a lifetime of overuse. Or, to put this a different way, if supposing you were to live forever, then wearing over-supporting shoes would be a bad idea; doing so makes one dependent on an infinite supply of a specific set of shoe technologies. Rather, the optimal solution would be to wear as little foot support as possible, bear the short-term pains of the transition, and develop and maintain tough feet indefinitely. However, you won't live forever, and so in some ways it makes sense to manage the slow decline of flattening arches and avoid catastrophic damage.

I don't have a solution to this problem, though I suspect the most practical solution is a balance between support and toughening up. It's worth keeping in mind, though, wherever this trade-off presents itself, that the distinction between helping and hurting is not always so clearly cut.

Mind

The universe, at least on the scales at which we observe it, is continually running down to ever less-ordered states—i.e., entropy is increasing. However, this running down is not distributed evenly; some parts of the universe run down faster than other parts, like how a large star burns itself up quicker than a small star. Some parts are even running up, such as the creation of a star from the accretion of enormous quantities of diffuse hydrogen atoms. On the whole, there's nothing unusual about the uneven distributions of entropy. It's much like how even within the mightiest of rivers you'll find eddies whereby water flows upstream and how even during an economic recession some people become wealthier. So it is with our universe, at least on the scales at which we observe it. On average the universe is becoming more disordered but some isolated pockets are becoming more ordered and more complex.

Earth's biosphere is an example of such an isolated pocket of increasing order. Observing it a few billion years in action, we see a wide range of complexity within it, from the relatively low-ordered state of inorganic matter such as rocks and streams to the high-ordered states of living things.

Part of life's upward climb in complexity, rare though non-unusual that upward climb is, has entailed the ongoing creation of ever more adaptive capacities in organisms. Ever since the first primitive organisms ran into conflict over limited resources, living things here on Earth have been locked in an arms race for adapting ever fitter forms and functions. Eventually, after eons of such change, some organisms crossed a threshold whereby they had evolved a central nervous system, which allows some adaptations to the environment to be made in real-time. Not that these first central nervous systems contained sentience. At first, even a primitive central nervous system provided a huge survival advantage over organisms that did not possess one, but arms races being what they are, soon the central nervous system itself became subject to the upward climb in complexity, and the result was ever bigger, ever more powerful brains.

Life's main adversary is life itself, and eventually some organisms came to benefit by possessing a brain capable of predicting the outcomes of brains of other organisms. Such predictive power enables one organism to anticipate another organism's actions and respond accordingly, like when a predator figures out the likeliest flight pattern for its chosen prey and cuts off that escape before flight even begins. This predictive power is the epitome of on-the-fly adaptiveness.

The way a brain predicts the outcomes of another brain is by “simulating” that other brain. The simulating brain generalizes and models the other brain and then “runs” the model to figure out what that other brain is likely to do. The simulating brain does not and cannot contain an actual copy of the other brain; it has no notion of the other brain's low-level neural activities. Rather, the simulating brain works through the high-level process of approximating the end result of all that low-level activity in the other brain.

There's great power in improved prediction of other organisms' brains, and the ideal such predicting brain is one that can universally model any other brain, not just some specific brains, like with a predator whose brain models only a few prey organisms' brains. Rather, such a “universal modeler” brain is able to peer in on any other brain and anticipate any type of outcome, even purely hypothetical ones. The human brain is the closest manifestation of a universal modeler.

Indeed, the adult human brain is not merely the closest manifestation to the ideal; it has surpassed a critical threshold in universality in that it can model even itself. An adult human brain can predict its own futures outcomes. This self-reflexivity is not unlike a camera taking a photograph of itself or a dictionary containing an entry for “dictionary”.

The human brain is not only capable of modeling itself, it does so much of the time. This is consciousness, the turned-on-most-of-the-time inward peering of a brain contemplating itself. But just as a camera cannot photograph itself without some trickery (e.g., a mirror or a preexisting photograph taken using another camera) and limitations (i.e., loss of fidelity), the self-modeled brain is grainy and distorted; the abstraction leaks. There is no end to the psychological havoc that this causes to the simulating mind (and to the simulated mind! (and to the simulated mind's simulated mind! (and to the simulated mind's simulated mind's simulated mind! (...!)))). The mind cannot even “see” the simulation process itself, for the simulation process is the mind. Even as I write these words, my own mind is only thinking about the simulation process and without any innate understanding of the process. The result is that the mind is continually stumped by the questions: “What am I?” and “Where am I?” We cannot answer these questions other than to say that the mind is a low-fidelity, feeding back onto itself, a kind of grainy infinity, like a hall-of-mirrors effect caused by looking at two mirrors aimed at each other. The mind is not separate from, not without, and not within the brain; it is the whole of the brain and the whole of being. Consciousness is not a core lurking somewhere within (and certainly not without!); it is everything tangled up in itself. Though there is no end to how special and rare the conscious mind is, there's nothing unusual about it.

Indeed, it is exactly that there is nothing unusual about the mind that makes it so special.