Filed under: Events, Ideas by Jeremy on Friday, 3rd September 2010 at 9:19 am
Most participants do not run a marathon to win.
- Wikipedia
On Sunday I will be honouring Wikipedia’s knowledge by trying not to win my first marathon. When I mention I’m running the marathon, the first question I get is: “Crazy. How long is a marathon?” The answer, 42.2km, usually prompts this question: “Weird. Why such an arbitrary distance?” The answer is stranger than the number itself.
According to a few sources, the reason the race is such a bizarre length has to do with an ancient Greek hero, the British Monarchy and an American shot-putter. The first marathons were 40km, approximately the distance the Greek hero Pheidippides (right) ran from the Battle of Marathon, where the Greeks defeated the Persians, to Athens to announce the battle had been won before falling over dead. Wikipedia claims the other 2.2km came from a peculiar event at the 1908 London Olympics:
The distance from the start of the Marathon to the finish at the stadium was established at these games. The original distance of 25 miles was changed to 26 miles so the marathon could start at Windsor Castle and then changed again at the request of Princess Mary so the start would be beneath the windows of the Royal Nursery.To ensure that the race would finish in the front of the King, the finish line was moved by British officials who, in response to shot putter and American flag carrier Ralph Rose’s refusal to dip the American flag before the Royal Box during the opening ceremony, “felt compelled to restore the importance of the monarchy.”
Meaning that during the last 2.2km all I’ll be thinking is that I’m getting screwed by an American shot-putter and King Edward VII.
If you want to cheer me on–or watch me suffer, you can click on the map here. To figure out when I’ll be going by, approximately, multiplying the km number where you’ll be by 5 (I plan on running about 5:00 a km). I might be there ten minutes before or after, depending on how I’m feeling.
Also, because our Western culture has no traditions of its own, I’ve decided to resurrect the tradition of relaying a message to all those who will listen at the finish line. I don’t want to divulge the message ahead of time but I have a feeling that it might be profound if I’m feeling good and profane if not.
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Thursday, 2nd September 2010 at 8:23 am
I have become profoundly interested in bias. Avoiding it is an important part of the research I do (studying bias and how to avoid it is a big part of epidemiology) but I also find it interesting to learn about the biases that are programmed into our tiny human brains. How sometimes, though we want to do the right thing, our biases lead us astray.
Confirmation bias is a classic example where people wanting to read up on a subject end up only getting part of the story because of the way they frame their search terms. For example, someone who doesn’t believe in global warming and who only searched Google for why global warming isn’t true will never come across the reams of great sites with reasons why global warming is reality. My personal way to counter this is to always try an convince myself of the opposite of what I believe. Sometimes my opinion yo-yos for a while, but when it stops swinging, I’m usually familiar enough with both sides of the argument to be comfortable with the opinion I’ve settled on.
The experiment is simple: Slovic asks people how much they would be willing to donate to various charitable causes. For example, Slovic found that when people were shown a picture of a single starving child named Rokia in Mali, they acted with impressive generosity. After looking at Rokia’s emaciated body and haunting brown eyes, they donated, on average, two dollars and fifty cents to Save the Children. However, when a second group of people were provided with a list of statistics about starvation throughout Africa⎯more than three million children in Malawi are malnourished, more than eleven million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance, etc.⎯the average donation was fifty percent lower. At first glance, this makes no sense. When we are informed about the true scope of the problem we should give more money, not less. Rokia’s tragic story is just the tip of the iceberg.
According to Slovic, the problem with statistics is that they don’t activate our moral emotions. The depressing numbers leave us cold: our mind can’t comprehend suffering on such a massive scale. This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a well, but turn a blind eye to the millions of people who die every year for lack of clean water. Or why we donate thousands of dollars to help a single African war orphan featured on the cover of a magazine, but ignore widespread genocides in Rwanda or Darfur. As Mother Theresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”
Lehrer says that identifiable victim bias explains why there is so much coverage of the trapped Chilean miners while comparatively larger crises go unnoticed. That doesn’t mean he’s not wholly sympathetic to the miners and their families:
Just because the identifiable victim bias exists doesn’t mean it’s a mistake to move heaven and earth to save the miners. That impulse reflects one of the noblest human urges. But it does suggest that we should be more mindful of all the moments when we’re not compassionate, when there are so many victims that no one can be identified.
It’s easy to counteract confirmation bias by reading up on what other people believe, but how do you get around identifiable victim bias? Only numbers can accurately describe the worst tragedies yet our minds don’t respond to numbers. What are we to do?
Filed under: Events by Jeremy on Wednesday, 1st September 2010 at 8:27 am
My apologies to those outside of Montreal for taunting you with an event like this but, those who live in this great city should head over to Santropol Roulant‘s Iron Chef Cook-Off tomorrow (Thursday) night.
Come join us for Santropol’s first ever Iron Chef cook-off! The event will take place on Thursday September 2nd from 5 – 10 in our garden space on McGill campus. Six teams representing local restaurants, such as Fuchsia, Crudessence, Lola Rosa and Serafim, will be given 1 hour to select food freshly from our garden. Then, with the help of only very basic materials: knife, cutting board, oil, salt and pepper, one grain, and one special ingredient– each group will cook up a menu on the spot for our panel of illustrious judges.
The Iron Chef Cook-Off is a fundraiser that pits several great local restaurants against each other in good-humoured competition.[...]The event is free (it will take place right in the McGill campus garden), beer and food is cheap, and the mighty Pat Jordache will supply late-summer jams. Please do come and watch me eat.
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Tuesday, 31st August 2010 at 6:56 am
Busy week and I’m coming down with something but here’s an interesting tidbit (via Wired: Science). We’ve manged to really make ourselves at home here during the last 300 years. Go to the full Wired: Science article to read up on how different this planet is now from three hundred years ago.
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Monday, 30th August 2010 at 6:40 am
I love Moby Dick. My copy is beaten up and written in from front to back. There’s so wisdom on every page. Here’s my favourite passage and one that seems to come up most often in conversation:
I should have underline the next line too. It’s true that if you’ve been comfortable for a long time, you can’t really appreciate your comfort anymore. I wonder what it would be like if, instead of always seeking comfort, people sought both comfort and contrast. I guess some people already do.
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Friday, 27th August 2010 at 6:36 am
These two videos have made me realize that both American conservatives and liberals are defending the American Way. The only thing is that the conservative American Way involves guns, jesus and high-fructose corn syrup and the liberal American Way is what the founding fathers of the U.S. actually said. It’s not really that cut and dried but it’s nice way to caricature it. Watch them, one’s funny and brilliant and the other is just brilliant.
But the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use.
I used to find this kind of article an affront to my environmentalist self. How dare this pigheaded New York Times writer tell me my most cherished beliefs are false! Worse, eating local has become part of my identity, you are attacking who I am! Then a moment of embarrassment would creep in as I realized that my belief is supposed to be to live life in as “sustainable” a way as possible not satisfy my personal environmental ego.
I’m sure Budiansky’s article has been fact-checked and that he hasn’t said anything grievously inaccurate. And I’ll agree that his tone is a little too adversarial for my tastes, but he’s got a point. Even if the point isn’t the point he thinks he’s making. Whoa. Hang on. Let me clear things up.
What’s really at issue here is what I like to call science-based environmentalism. Prefacing any sort of practice with “science-based” has become a popular way of conveying the fact that a lot of what we do is often based just as much in routine or tradition as it is in the science about the practice. In one sense I can sympathize. Science–particularly complex sciences like medicine and ecology–can change faster than the Montreal Canadiens’ roster. Today’s Jaroslav Halak can be tomorrow’s Carey Price or, for the less hockey inclined, what’s good today may not be good tomorrow (burn!).
What I think lacks, to a certain degree, in some environmentalists (I said some!) is a willingness to keep abreast of what science has to offer in terms of informing their smaller-than-thou footprint lives. I have encountered some people who think that they can know what makes an environmentally friendly life from how something feels. Sometimes they’re right on the money. Sometimes they’re knowledge is as shaky as Andre Racicot (has the hockey season started yet cause these hockey metaphors are getting outta hand).
It is difficult to keep up with this research. The research isn’t always published in accessible places or conveyed in ways that are easily understood. Doing the research takes time that sometimes we don’t have. And science doesn’t offer clear cut answers (if done properly) but only suggestions–sometimes it can’t say anything at all.
In the end, I’d like environmentalism to be a dynamic “ism” where ideas change with time to better reflect our state of knowledge (can’t help but mention Stewart Brand here). We’ll disagree. We’ll make mistakes. All I’m asking is that we read articles like Budiansky’s with an open mind knowing that everybody is wrong sometimes (though maybe not on this issue).
This post sounds a little preachy and I hate that. But I’ll be the first to admit that I include myself in the people this post is addressing.
Filed under: Create by Jeremy on Wednesday, 25th August 2010 at 6:10 am
Here’s an excerpt from an interview with award-winning Toronto poet Matthew Tierney where he’s asked about the special relativity of poetry, kind of. His answer dips and dives but it’s worth a look (from Maisonneuve):
Linda Besner: If we think of Einstein’s theory of relativity, the idea is that time goes by more slowly for objects that are moving than for objects that are static. Here’s a koan for you if you wre trapped on this traffic island for all time: which is moving faster, the reader or the poem? A poem in its printed form is static—it’s just sitting there on the page—but the ideas in it are highly kinetic. The reader is sitting there reading, but his or her mind is racing in all directions chasing after the poem’s meaning. Which has higher velocity?
Matthew Tierney: Whoah, tough one. I think to answer the question, though, you have to pin the poem down. Maybe part of the appeal of poetry is that it’s unpindownable. Its very attractiveness is in its failure to do what it sets out to do, which is to stop time. I always think, when I’m writing something—and it kind of pisses me off—how long I spend writing a poem and how quickly people read it. I mean, you can spend years writing a poem. And it takes about a minute for someone to read. So it feels way out of whack, the amount of reading time people give to something. But maybe I shouldn’t put equals signs between those two types of time, reading time and writing time. I do feel like in a poem that’s working really well, it’s like all parts of it are more alert and aware of each other than you are. It’s a challenge to read poems in that way, to pay that kind of attention, not just zip through. Muldoon would say that reading a poem is like reading the mind of the writer at the moment they wrote it. Muldoon would say the heightened state in which you writing poetry is the state you need to be in to read it. HONK IF YOU LOVE MULDOON!
(A passing car in the traffic ocean has let out a sound infinitely more obnoxious than the cry of seagulls. Tierney waves after it, shading his eyes from the island sun.)
Matthew Tierney: Lots of Muldoon fans out today. Anyway, he’d say that this is where the difficulty and the enjoyment are. I know when I go back to read my own poems they’re faster than I am, they escape me. I was in a compressed state of focus when I wrote them and I can’t get back there
Free-market economics are really good at making sure that each laptop I buy is cheaper than the last but, at the same time, it’s really terrible at addressing issues like stimulating new research into treatments for tuberculosis and malaria because there’s a lot more money to be made by coming up with new treatments for curing rich, white people of their baldness.
It doesn’t do the free market side any favors if all of its advocates are willing to overlook sloppy logic and evidence and just follow clan-like loyalties based on the final conclusions. We will only move beyond the “religious war” if both the anti-market and pro-market sides are rigorously honest about the strengths and weaknesses of their own arguments.
And guess who agrees with both of us. A man who has benefited from capitalism more than I benefited from my dental plan as a grad student (how many cavities?!): Bill Gates. The whole talk is interesting, but the part I’m referencing specifically starts at 1:30 where he mentions how far innovation and markets have taken us and then goes on to give three examples of where markets have failed. Brilliant.
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Monday, 23rd August 2010 at 6:15 am
This is a guest post from Madeline who is volunteering for three weeks in Accra, Ghana. If you’ve had an experience abroad (or at home) that you’d like to share, shoot me an email.
I’m in Africa, in Ghana, and I haven’t completely reconciled myself with that fact. Probably because I’m in the capital (Accra) which is just a big city. It definitely has its own flavour, mostly in the form of pollution that burns the eyes and throat, traffic laws that don’t make any sense, strange signs–my personal favourite being “The Blood of Christ Fast Food” or “Jesus Jesus Jesus” with no indication of what kind of good or service it provides–and very creatively patched up buildings. I think some people in my group were expecting people to be wearing loincloths and all the babies with swollen stomachs. Some also seem surprised that everyone speaks English which is, by the way, their national language.
It’s amazing how there are some things we’ve all gotten used to really fast–like the toilets. A toilet with a seat is a luxury that sends any of us calling for the others to take advantage even if the toilet doesn’t flush, has no paper or if you have to share it with the local fauna. Also, watching the ladies with babies strapped to their backs swinging them around with seemingly no thought to their baby’s head and what it may hit doesn’t make me cringe quite as much as it used to.
There are two things which are standout experiences. The first is being a visible minority. In Ghana people are very friendly (we would definitely say that they have absolutely no sense of boundaries), and luckily, for the most part, they like white people (who they call obrunis). Children yell obruni at us wherever we go and fight for the privilege of holding our hands. Men stroke the women in our group as we walk by and often propose marriage. The feeling of being special wears off quickly though, and sometimes I get sick of being constantly touched and stared at by strangers. The Ghanaian stereotypes of white people are hard to shake too. It’s definitely interesting to walk in shoes some walk in their whole life–at home there is absolutely nothing about me that makes me a visible minority.
The second standout experience is relinquishing my expectations. “Ghanaian time” runs anywhere from a few hours slow to a few hours fast. Meeting up with people is really hard and, if you let it get to you, it’s easy to be frustrated . Mostly though, it’s about letting go of plans, which is something I’m not usually good at, in order to enjoy all the wonderful spontaneity that is Ghana. One night, when our group was supposed to be planning our presentation for the next day, we got lured to a stranger’s funeral. Or, on our way to a bar, we made friends with some people from one of the slums in Accra and ended up hanging out there for the evening. I can feel my dependence on plans starting to melt away the longer I stay here. Let’s see how my professors like that.
Death Panels Add Life [Overcoming Bias]: “[patients receiving palliative care] typically lived almost three months longer than the group getting standard care, who lived a median of nine months.”
Russia in color, a century ago [Boston.com]: “color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns t
The Rebel Sell [This]: “What we need to realize is that consumerism is not an ideology. It is not something that people get tricked into. Consumerism is something that we actively do to one another.”
On Sunday I will be honouring Wikipedia’s knowledge by trying not to win my first marathon. When I mention I’m running the marathon, the first question I get is: “Crazy. How long is a marathon?” The answer, 42.2km, usually prompts this question: “Weird. Why such an arbitrary distance?” The answer is stranger than the number itself.
I used to find this kind of article an affront to my environmentalist self. How dare this pigheaded New York Times writer tell me my most cherished beliefs are false! Worse, eating local has become part of my identity, you are attacking who I am! Then a moment of embarrassment would creep in as I realized that my belief is supposed to be to live life in as “sustainable” a way as possible not satisfy my personal environmental ego.
