Racing as dessert

The most apt metaphor I've come up with for thinking about racing is that racing is dessert and training for races is a balanced, wholesome meal. The point here being that a consistent diet of training is good for you and too much racing can be bad for you (but a little is certainly okay).

I think this metaphor applies to all kinds of people. For the person frozen to the couch and who maybe has tried some exercise several times in the past but can't achieve long-term consistency, the ice cream sundae that is a 10K running race three months away may be just what's needed to develop the short-term discipline to eat one's peas and mushrooms of getting off that coach and doing some runs around the neighborhood after work every other day.

However, the way I intend this metaphor is much more self-centered; it is the outlook of a fit thirty-one year-old who holds a mildly skeptical opinion of the racing scene. What I've observed these last few years is that most of my fitness-oriented growth and development, both physically and mentally, comes as a result of all the training I do leading up to a race, and the races themselves contribute little but a treadmill's worth of non-renewable external motivation. Basing a pursuit on external motivation seems dangerous to me, and focusing on racing seems narrow.

Just as dessert does not provide any key nutrients, racing does not provide any unique aspects to fitness. I was reminded of this fact last Tuesday when the Hour of Power morning ride I regularly ride transformed into a race-like environment of attacks and impromptu strategy. The group found itself in between the winter doldrums and summer suffer fests, and with it happening that no one showed who was strong enough or willing enough to dominate, the result was a free-for-all of mayhem and red-lined heart rates. And I didn't pay anything to be a part of it; it's just an informal, group ride. From it I received a great workout, and I burned through a lot of stress chemicals and was left with a sense of satisfaction that lingers two days later. So even the competitiveness of racing is not unique; there are biking and running and swimming clubs all over, and everyone who's not anyone is bound to find others who are their match.

But again, races are not bad, just as desserts are not bad. There's more to life than simply growth and development; we ought to take some time to enjoy the geological blink-of-an-eye amount of time we're alloted. Some of us enjoy racing, and we should race. However, racing is only dessert, an enjoyment to be had after having eaten one's meat and potatoes. Have you eaten your meat and potatoes?

Some thoughts about complexity

Information and order are indirectly correlated, and this has to do with how the terms are defined. The more ordered something is, the less information you need to describe it; the more disordered something is, the more information you need to describe it. This runs somewhat counter to the everyday, casual use of the words “information” and “order”—at least for me—so I use the example of a ransacked library to keep the concept straight in my mind. A ransacked library is highly disordered; all books have been thrown off the shelves and lie as mountainous heaps on the floor. A concise Dewey Decimal System call number becomes insufficient for locating a book, especially if the book has been ripped into many pieces. Rather, the book and any of its scattered pages must be individually specified by precise directions: e.g., the twelfth book from the bottom in the heap located twenty-six inches immediately south of the corner of the east end of the shelf formerly containing D-E children's fiction.

If information and order are something of opposites, what then is the relationship between information and complexity? Complexity is closely tied to order, with complexity appearing to arise in systems possessing well ordered heterogeneity, so are information and complexity something of opposites, too? Could complexity be defined in part as a lack of information? This certainly runs counter to casual use of the terms!

Complex things we readily observe in the world appear to be hallmarks of embodied information, not islands freer from information than the simpler things of the world. Imagine the space shuttle and the immense web of technical specifications and knowledge needed to design, build, maintain, and operate it. How could complexity ever be oppositional to information?

This poses a problem with the casual notion of complexity: we tend to think of bigger things as being more complex, on average, than smaller things. If we're aiming to isolate the essence of complexity itself, this is no good; we're letting additional characteristics—e.g., bigness— cloud whatever sense we can make of complexity. In the case of the space shuttle, it seems complex because it is big. (It also seems complex because it's high-tech, but that's a whole other point.) As far as embodied information goes, I imagine the shuttle is a good deal easier to describe in full than nearly any other billions-of-dollars set of things you care to name. I write that with some measure of certainty because the shuttle is fully described—or very nearly so—through endless stacks of engineering specs.

Can complexity be normalized to capture its essence better? That is, if two things, A and B, are equally complex and A is twice as big as B, then we would say that A possesses half the quantity of normalized complexity as does B. But how should we measure size? In grams? In dollars? In seconds of existence? This is not clear. But mass seems like a good place to start.

A few Google searches for determining the number of parts in a space shuttle didn't yield any results—maybe that's not public information—but 747's contain on the order a million separate parts, so I estimate that the shuttle has on the order ten or a hundred million parts. Contrast that to the nervous system of a cockroach, which has on the order of a million neurons. But a cockroach's nervous system is far, far smaller than the shuttle. Its “complexity density,” as determined by its part-to-mass ratio, is therefore greater. To some extent this makes sense in that we can design and understand shuttles but as yet lack the ability to design and understand cockroach brains, though we may be getting close. Perhaps complexity density explains why a big but less-complexity-dense entity like the shuttle better yields itself to brute force engineering than do organic, well ordered entities such as cockroaches.

Lt. Commander Data

One of my favorite TV shows growing up was Star Trek: The Next Generation. And my favorite character on that show was the pale-skinned android, Lt. Commander Data.

Data was a window into the meaning of sentience and of being human. He was also a strange, inconsistent fellow. How could it possibly be that he could perfectly perform millions or billions of math calculations per second and not be able to substitute “I'm” for “I am” or use any other contraction?

When I was young, it seemed everyone older had the answers, but of course the Star Trek: TNG writers were just making it all up as they went, and they met their burden of plausible explanation by having Data and the other Star Trek characters vaguely allude to Data's positronic brain, just as Asimov gave his robots mysterious-sounding positronic brains decades before. As to the question: why is Data self-aware when all our own 20th and now 21st century machines are not? It's the positronic aspect of his brain.

It's hazardous to generalize about sentience, being as how we humans don't know of any other examples in the universe, and it remains an open question in the philosophy of mind as to how much the peculiarities of the underlying hardware affect consciousness, but I'll chuck discretion aside and posit that if there really existed someone like Lt. Commander Data, and he did possess self-awareness, then he would not be able to perform those millions or billions of calculations any faster than I can. That is, he would have to program a computation machine to do the calculations for him, just as I have to do.

The philosophy of mind is a wildly divergent field; its contributers and followers don't yet even agree whether the brain hardware is in someway fundamentally special stuff, as far as the laws of physics go. This is to say that what I'm writing in this post is only my opinion, and it's unaccredited opinion at that. However, here's what I know. I know that the underlying hardware of the human brain is capable of performing trillions if not quadrillions of calculations per second, all taking the form of neurons molecularly adding together the weighted input of other neurons' outputs and propagating their own summation outputs to yet other neurons. Whereas the computer on which I'm typing this blog post performs a small number of calculations simultaneously but performs each calculation in a nanosecond or so, the human brain achieves its speed by performing its calculations with massive parallelism. Even with its “clock speed” over a million times slower than a $300 laptop's CPU's, the human brain is still far faster than any single machine we can fabricate.

And yet, ask nearly any human to do some math, and though our self, our I, rests upon this awesomely fast, biological computer in our head, the human will be slow and error-prone. It's like dropping a 500HP engine into a car and achieving nothing more than golf cart power, only this analogy doesn't come close to capturing the scale of the discrepancy. As to what causes the discrepancy, the philosophers of mind are working on it. My guess is that consciousness is fundamentally computationally expensive. But in any event we know the discrepancy exists. Consciousness appears to be bloatware to a scale beyond anything software developers have been able to create. Even the ones who work at Microsoft.

Returning to the positronic brain, why then should we expect Star Trek's Data to be so perfect and so fast at mental math? Somehow, Data must possess bloat-free consciousness, an ability to cut through its layers and manipulate his “positrons” directly. This makes as much sense as does a human capable of manipulating his own neurons directly. Rather, I'd expect Data to be as confounded and awed by the mysteriousness of his positronic brain as we are confounded and awed by our own brains, and Data would be thinking those thoughts of puzzlement and reverence with the same slowness and fuzziness that we think ours.

On the other hand, I'm just making this up as I go along.

Post #197

Lately I've been ingesting frequent, small doses of television, owing to the three days a week I'm in the men's locker room at the local gym before and after swimming. My friend Jeff commented years ago that the gym was his main source of keeping up to date with the latest in pop music. For me, the gym is my main source for knowing what's going on in professional sports, being as how the locker room TV sets are more often than not tuned to a sports news show.

Lately, the loudest hubbub on those shows has been about college basketball and, invariably, the various “mistakes” made by the games' referees. (The quotation marks in that previous sentence are quite intentional because little in the way of basketball refereeing seems objective to me.) In this case, a referee called a five-second violation on a Texas player in the waning seconds of the Texas-Arizona game, though instant replay clearly shows that the player signaled for a timeout before his five seconds expired. But the violation call had been made, causing Texas to turn over the ball, and it happened that Arizona ended up coming from behind to win. Thus, thousands of people were arbitrarily made happier here in Arizona while thousands of people in Texas were arbitrarily made unhappier. All this is likely the fault of one guy wearing black pants and a striped shirt. And you think you get singled out for messing up where you work!

Frankly, I don't understand fans' angst against referees who blow calls. I can understand and sympathize with players' frustrations but not the fans'. Listening to these sports shows' commentary in the mornings, it's obvious that, for many, watching sports is more about outcomes and the following of process and proper procedure than it is about enjoyment and entertainment. It seems silly how fans regularly put their emotions at risk like this.

I remember my dad commenting after the Oilers left Houston in the 1990s about how it was much better without a local team around. Instead of the TV always carrying the local game, which may or may not have been a good match-up any given week, the TV stations in Houston were free to broadcast what was expected to be the best game in the league. I think this reasoning can be carried further. Once a fan stops identifying with the success or failure of a particular team or athlete, he can enjoy nearly any game, regardless of the outcome, regardless whether officials blow calls and whatever other controversy occurs. Or, better yet, that fan can stop watching altogether and instead finish putting on his goggles and go swimming.

Blowout

This last Tuesday during my morning bike ride I suffered a front-tire blowout. It happened on a winding downhill portion of the route immediately following a turn. I was second in the group, in front of ten or so other riders following closely in single file.

Pop! Hiss, hiss, hiss, hiss—the unmistakable sound of air escaping a revolving leak. But though a blowout is unmistakable, one has only seconds to react. A blown out 700x23 road tire is flat when its pressure drops much below 80 PSI, and when it's the front tire that's flat, the bike is made nearly incapable of turning, for the wheel rim will slide right off the flattened rubber between it and the road surface and the bike will tip over instead of turn with the wheel. Fortunately, my tire blew out on a straight stretch of road rather than on a turn, and the loud pop of the sidewall blowing out alarmed the other riders enough for me to have room to maneuver to a stop safely on the side of the road.

But what does one do with a blown out sidewall on the side of the road in the dark, pre-sunrise hours? To fix a typical puncture flat, one removes the puncturing debris from the tire and replaces the inner tube. With a hole in the tire itself, any new tube will itself also blow out.

There's a handy fix for this. It's George Washington. A dollar bill makes for an except temporary tire patch for blowouts and, these days, is rather cheap. To use, you fix the flat as you would any other, only before slipping on the tire over the new tube you insert the folded bill between the new tube and tire to cover the blowout. A dollar bill is strong enough to prevent the tube from bursting through the sidewall hole, though every time I've used this technique I marvel at how a thin weave of cotton and linen can reliably hold against 120 PSI. But it has held every time. In fact, one time I forgot to change the tire when I arrived home after suffering a blowout, and I ended up riding on the blown out tire for several months. It wasn't until the same tire punctured in a different spot and my seeing a ratty dollar bill fall out of the tire when changing its tube that I remembered that the tire itself had a hole in it.

Thus, every flat-tire kit should contain, in addition to tire levers, spare tubes, and pump or inflater and CO₂ cartridges, a few dollar bills.

I quit

I quit. It seemed like a great deal at the time, signing up early for a half-Ironman distance triathlon this April for about $160. But there's a major problem with signing up for these races ahead of time, and that's that one must stay healthy and injury-free to participate in them. I've had good success so far in showing up to races ready and able, but this time the odds have caught up with me, and I'm forced to use two of the most powerful words in the English language. I quit.

In this case, I'm injured. Remarkably, I've avoided sickness all winter long, the first time I've managed that since I can't remember when, but I've made up for healthiness by being not just injured but doubly so. First, I have this ongoing hip problem that first surfaced way back in late 2008 when I picked up running after a two-year hiatus. It's taken a little over another two years for it to become a problem. Second, I have a pulled groin, which is a recent injury I recently suffered chasing skirts in a 400m interval during a speed workout about a month ago. Neither injury affects any activity except running. (My swimming and biking remain fine, insofar as I'm ever able to say that my swimming is fine.) Together, these injuries hint that my running core is weak and in desperate need of improvement.

They also suggest that I'm not a distance runner and should stick with the shorter, less grinding distances I find comfortable. I had been pushing for extra distance in my runs for several months, and I think the coincidental onset of these injuries is not just bad luck. Though I've run for many years of my life, starting during my mid-teens, I've mostly stuck with the about-three-miles run. It's a good distance. It comprised my favorite loop around the neighborhood I grew up in, it's the distance around the track at Memorial Park in Houston, and it's the distance of the run in most sprint triathlons.

The problem with the about-three-miles distance, though, is that it doesn't net you any respect. Sprint triathlons and 5K races aren't really real, just ask any amateur athlete; to impress, you must go for body-grinding and mind-numbing long distances like Ironman triathlons and full marathons, even though such distances come at the cost of slowing down a great deal. So that is what we amateur athletes do; we slow down and go for distance.

I got suckered into this trap. But no more. From now on I have it as a goal to stick with what I'm good at and enjoy most: fast speeds and short distances. Happily, this involves doing something else I'm good at: embracing contrariness.

Descent, pt. 6

This is the sixth and final entry of a multi-part post. The previous parts are Descent, pt. 1, Descent, pt. 2, Descent, pt. 3, Descent, pt. 4, and Descent, pt. 5.

Down scope!

Previously, I wrote about my skepticism that peak oil's effects, as envisioned within The Long Descent, can be timed accurately enough to base specific preparations on. While it makes sense to learn practical skills and live on fewer resources if that is what you want to do anyway, I think peak oil by itself serves as insufficient reason to make such changes. For those of us who have invested substantial time and money in our current careers, there is considerable risk in walking away from that foundation right now when it may be decades before we must change. For us, for now, it may make the most sense to make what preparations we can while firmly entrenched within our urban, non-productive lifestyles, even those preparations amount to not much. This leads into the issue of scoping.

By scoping I refer to the difference between what is good for everyone and what is good for anyone. I get the impression that Greer is more concerned about the good of all humanity than the good of any one reader, and consequently his advice about what we should be doing about peak oil right now may better target the well being of the collective than it does the individual. I have little doubt that future, yet born humans will benefit greatly by many old, obsolete technologies we rediscover and put back into practice, and the more people invest in old technologies today, the more future humans may benefit. But the individuals who do the rediscovering and the putting back into practice may themselves not fare so well.

This makes for a kind of prisoner's dilemma scenario, but one where the prisoners are playing a game of musical chairs. Greer believes that the winners will be among the ones who bow out early and make their adaptations sooner rather than later. But there are costs associated with being an early adopter, even if it's the adoption of antiquated technologies. Early adopters make mistakes and generally fail to benefit from collective learning. Rather, the winners during the long descent may be among the people who fight as bitterly and doggedly as possible to hang on to dwindling resources, and, once forced to bow out, pick up on key discoveries made by early adopters. Future humans might not benefit from such hanging on, but that is besides the point when looking at Greer's advice from perspective of determining what is in our own, individual interest. What should I be doing?

Creativity

So far in this multi-part post, I've tried to refrain from challenging Greer's assumptions. But before one is to take another's advice seriously, one should test assumptions. What do I think of Greer's?

I assign a high probability that Greer's predictions of very long term trends are generally accurate: industrial civilization's fate will likely be little different on the whole than the slow rise and fall of every other past, great civilization. However, his view of the future seems too inspired by what's in the rear view mirror. I think it will be unlikely that the future will be an unwinding of the past, like a history book read backwards.

My historical perspective suggests to me that humans rarely move backwards. Though older, obsolete technologies do come back into fashion and replace newer ones every once in a while, each generation seems to discover its own solutions to old and new problems. Industrial civilization has changed the world too much, caused too many disruptions, to make a future of regression a solid bet anytime soon. With the last few hundred years' mass migrations of peoples, plants, and animals; its new entanglements of inter-civilization communication; and all the new hard-won scientific information that's been discovered, the future is wide open, technologically. We are prudent to say that future technologies will generally be thriftier with energy than current ones, and this suggests that many 1700s and 1800s technologies may be put back into common practice. However, many wholly new ones will be invented—ideas we can't imagine today. The winners during the long descent may well be among the forward-looking, not the backward-looking.

On the other hand...

Despite my skepticism of Greer's advice in The Long Descent, I'll credit the author and book this much: I can't think of anything better to do than to broaden one's skill set and get into the habit of living on less—at least within the safety of one's current career and lifestyle. What else is one going to do with one's free time?

Despite the skepticism of Greer's advice I've outlined, I have been making small efforts to follow it. I'm buying more bulk ingredients and cooking instead of buying packaged foods. I've taken up darning my wool socks. I've gained a general distrust of outsourcing services to others. I'm planning on building a bike rack for my apartment rather than buying one of many cheaply available ones online, though I'll have to spend less time riding my bikes if I am to ever get around to working on this project… In the end, The Long Descent may be less about industrial civilization and our long-term future and more about what we should all be doing anyway to enrich our lives, today. This makes for sage advice indeed.

Above all, I recommend The Long Descent to anyone looking for an introduction to peak oil. This isn't a book that can be unread; afterwards, readers invariably find themselves challenging their own assumptions and forever viewing the world a little differently than they did before. That is high praise for any book.

Rising food costs

Since about 2007 I'd been reading a lot about soaring food prices worldwide, and none of it had corresponded to what I'd observed in my own life. Back in 2008, at the height of the hubbub of rising prices, I saw only a few changes, the only specific one I remember being a gallon of organic milk notching up a few dimes at the grocer down the street. Then commodity prices peaked later that year, deflation set in, and the price of organic milk dropped back to normal.

Again I'm hearing a lot about rising food prices, again corresponding with rising energy prices, and again I'm hearing how “soon Americans will be feeling the pinch like the rest of the world.” This time, however, I'm seeing those price increases firsthand. It's no longer just news; it's now real life. Indeed, it seems like everything on the grocery store shelves are notching up these days.

Partly this has to do with how I just finished shopping at Fry's tonight. I'll be honest here; I despise Fry's. I despise their gimmicks like member cards, coupons, and weekly price fluctuations. I despise their self-checkout system. I despise how they charge twice as much as their competitors do for natural peanut butter and extra virgin olive oil. I despise how they charge twice as much for steel cut oats as they themselves charge for rolled oats. It's the same oat! What gives?

But it's not just tonight's visit to the evil grocer down the street that has me observing rising food prices firsthand. I figure I'm one of the first Americans in line to be directly touched by rising food prices because I eat out infrequently and I rarely eat prepared foods. Most of what I eat I cook: oatmeal from bulk oats, rice and beans, eggs and toast, and so on. I don't cook fancy or complicated meals, just quick and easy ones using simple, cheap ingredients. As such, most of my food costs are going towards the food, not its marketing, packaging, and preparation. Prepared foods like cold cereal and ready-to-eat meals like those in the freezer section have only a portion of their cost based on the cost of their constituent ingredients, so their prices are more insulated from food-price inflation. Whereas, when the price of raw ingredients doubles, then my grocery bill nearly doubles.

So where is this going?

Descent, pt. 5

This is the fifth entry of a multi-part post. The previous parts are Descent, pt. 1, Descent, pt. 2, Descent, pt. 3, and Descent, pt. 4.

To do what?

What sense is to be made of The Long Descent? Greer plainly asserts that it's in our interest to pursue a produce-more, consume-less lifestyle, that we equip ourselves with the knowledge and skills to produce goods and services that other people will need and that we learn to get by on fewer resources and with less reliance upon the market economy. Does this mean that I should quit my software job and concentrate on raising backyard chickens? How enthusiastically should I take Greer's advice, if at all?

To be fair, Greer does not advocate that we all change suddenly and radically. Though, by arguing that we should be generalizing rather than specializing and pursuing “trailing edge” technologies rather than leading-edge ones, he clearly departs from modern conventional wisdom. Greer suggests that his are lower-risk strategies in upcoming years than conventional wisdom's, but I'm not wholly convinced and for three reasons. These reasons are: timing, scope, and creativity.

Timing is everything

It's no great secret how to forecast with greater accuracy: be more vague. The less specific a forecast is, the more likely it is to come true; the more specific it is, the less likely it is to come true. The Long Descent aims for accuracy but at the cost of specificity. As a result, Greer operates on the scale of decades and centuries rather than months and years. This means that The Long Descent is probably more correct than what could otherwise be expected with a book predicting the ramifications of a big issue like peak oil. (We'll see.) On the other hand, even if Greer gets the big picture mostly correct, his timing may easily be off by decades, and it's the months and years that matter most with respect to most individuals' day-to-day fortunes and fates. For example, if I came into the certain knowledge that the software industry will entirely cease to exist within thirty years, I might continue my current career with the hope that the industry's death happens later rather than sooner. After all, I'm highly invested in my current career, and a shorter career in software may still be more lucrative for me than a longer career in backyard chickens. This is to illustrate how it may be that Greer's argument is both more accurate and less relevant.

Do we have any reasons to suspect that Greer's predictions will be off by decades? I think so. Here are three possibilities.

• The trend of decreasing global oil production throughout the 21st century may prove significantly asymmetrical to the increases of the 19th and 20th centuries. The downslope may be flatter than the upslope. There is some evidence to support this currently, as oil production has been flat for nearly a decade now, though some view this as evidence that the eventual downslope will be sharper. I think this shows that we don't know one way or the other.

• The other fossil fuels may make up for lagging oil production for a while. Natural gas production is expected by many to peak soon, but coal may not peak for two more decades.

• The decrease of prosperity and material wealth may lag behind energy production by a short while. Many instances of our material infrastructure embody more energy than they require for continual operation. Some examples are: houses, roads, and dams. These will continue to provide value for a while after we lose the ability to produce them as cheaply as we now do.

• Increases in energy efficiency may slow the decline for a while.

None of these reasons assure me of anything, which is my point. While I think the prudent, long-term bet is to expect longer and harder economic contractions and shorter and milder recoveries, it may well be a few decades before Greer's four horsemen pay us a visit. How should one spend these next decades of uncertainty? If timing the fall weren't difficult enough, there are the differences between how decline affects individuals and how it affects civilization as a whole.

I'm reminded of the saying that a recession is when your neighbor is out of work, and a depression is when you're out of work. Though the patterns of booms and busts for large economies play out as long, sweeping curves of GDP graphs and stock market charts, the perspective of any one individual is more like the discrete, on-off state of a light switch on the wall. The economy's GDP may drop by 2%; if you're not self-employed, chances are that your income will stay about the same or drop by 100%. Civilizations have built into them a complex set of negative feedback loops that work to prevent the civilization from zooming one way or the other too fast; individuals for the most part lack such stabilizing influences, especially individuals utterly dependent upon the market economy.

It's easy to view Greer's catabolic collapse and long descent as abstractions for our own personal fortunes, that our lives will follow a similar long-descent pattern as the world around us does, but such thinking doesn't jive with personal experience with recessions. I think what we should instead expect is that most of us will be largely unaffected at any given time by the descent until the horsemen visit us while sparing our neighbor—or come for our neighbor while sparing us. Or they come for both us and our neighbor while people in another industrialized country halfway around the globe are spared.

Just to illustrate my point, imagine you lose your job and remain mostly unemployed for several years, during which time you also lose your house and your car. You think of several worthwhile career changes, but each change requires further education or certification, and you're too busy and broke muddling through day by day to get back on track with long-term plans, especially if you have a family to support in the meantime. Meanwhile, most everyone else around you is unaffected by the “sluggish” economy and wonders a bit about your bad luck. It might be that the economy will overall take a 75% hit spread out over the seven or so decades of your lifetime, but you may very well take that hit all at once halfway through. The economy sweeps along the mild undulations of the economists' charts; your own fortune blinks in and out like with the flicks of a switch.

What does this mean? My take is that it adds to the uncertainty of timing the descent and suggests that we temper our expectations of our best laid plans. But what about Greer's advice of learning practical skills? I'll expand upon this more next week when I write about my two other criticisms, scope and creativity, and wrap up this long review.