On June 26, just as dusk began to settle, I took my final strides across a line that I didn’t expect to cross again some 20 hours earlier. The Lavaredo Ultra Trail, which traditionally begins to the dramatic soundtrack of “Ecstasy of Gold”, was the first race I participated in after a serious surgery in November 2020. Despite ample experience with long-distance running, this intervention decidedly shuffled the deck against me, and put me in a similar position as back when I confronted such a distance for the first time. There are a few things I learned along the way…
Since its inception, this blog (if indeed that is the right word) has been notoriously short on regular updates and fresh content. The reason for this is simple enough: For better or worse, I prefer articles that look at different aspects of an issue, and in case of doubt would always delay publication instead of putting out something that I’m not entirely convinced of. Combined with the fact that all of this is done in my spare time, this means that the number of published pieces is doomed to remain low, at least for the time being.
Nevertheless, if you’re…
What is fueling the engine of progress, and for how much longer?
There is probably no more famous formula in physics than E = mc ². It is arguably the one mathematical statement (Pythagoras’ theorem being the only real contender) that has made its way into popular culture. It’s no exaggeration to say that Einstein’s arguments, which led him to postulate the fundamental equivalence of energy and matter above, have revolutionized physics. In Energy and Civilization: A History, environmental scientist Vaclav Smil (who counts Bill Gates among his loyal followers) proposes to derive a similar relationship between energy and what we’ve come to call civilization: culture, infrastructure, economic development and other human…
No need to waste words on another introduction, let’s dig right into it.
Honeybee Democracy, Thomas D. Seeley *
Sometimes the best books are those from which you expect it least. And while I like to think of myself as someone who appreciates how seemingly mundane topics can hold deep insights, if studied with passion, I did not expect to be awed by honeybees and how they go about finding a new home. Well, guess what! Maybe I’m easy too impress, but what an intellectual pleasure to try understanding the workings of a hive.
Two things I want to note: Honeybee…
When I originally started blogging on Medium back in 2018, I had hoped to offer content more regularly, but it has proven tough to generate a steady outflow of articles between all other commitments. Therefore I’m quite happy to at least be able to share with you a the review of my 2020 books, already kind of a tradition. A grand total auf 35 books were read cover to cover this year, which is significantly more than last year (20), but one book short of 2018. Whether this is because the books were longer on average (intuitively yes) or for…
In the last article on this topic, we tried to visualize the global overview of activities provided by sports tracking apps such as Strava. That’s a good place to get started, but to be perfectly honest, it isn’t all that interesting on the programming side. In a sense, all we did was to manipulate a given data frame in a clever way and plot the relationship between the different quantities to understand our performance better. Nothing wrong with that, of course: It’s just that there are so much more we can do that it’d be a shame to stop there.
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How to use Python & Strava to visualize almost anything for your activities
If you’ve come across any of my articles before, you will have noticed that I’m very much into long-distance running (see “The What, How And Why of Ultrarunning”). I’m also a data scientist by trade, and I’ve been consistently logging my activities with Strava ever since I got serious about running in 2016. So what would be more natural than to try and analyze the data thus generated myself? And after playing around with it for a while, I realized that this might be interesting for other people as well. …
Trump supporters have presented numerous pieces of evidence that allegedly show how the Democrats rigged the elections. Debunking them isn’t always straightforward.
The sorry state that the GOP has fallen into is nowhere more evident than in their current attempt to prove that the recent election, which the incumbent president Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden, has been manipulated by sinister forces to secure the desired outcome. Many of the claims they have made along the way are mutually exclusive and/or easily refuted (see here, here, here, here and here, for but a small sample of such refutations). A large share of them feeds on the narrative of a ‘deep state’ conspiracy theory, according to which a hybrid association of top public…
Almost everyone underestimated the havoc that COVID-19 would wreak on public health. Will the same be true for the wider effects on society that have just begun to unfold?
The Kübler-Ross model (better known as the five stages of grief) tells us that, when hit by a tragedy, people move through a predictable sequence of stages as they try to adapt to the new circumstances — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These days, a similar dynamic seems to be at play for the novel Coronavirus. At first, hardly anyone acknowledged that we were headed for a full-blown pandemic. Anger came next: The concert that was cancelled, the trip that would have to be postponed. As more and more events were affected by this, there was still hope that…
Last year at around this time, I published a review of 2018 as told by the books I’ve read throughout the year. Since then, I’ve changed my mind about some things, but I still believe that this is a much more fruitful type of review than the typical condensed news and celebrity obituaries way of looking back, no less because it’s unique to everyone.
All in all, 2019 saw a lot fewer books being finished (20 vs. 36), which I mostly blame on two tomes — Infinite Jest and Gödel, Escher, Bach — that both took me a long time…
