Running

I’ve been working to get into the Hardrock 100 since 2013, and finally made it through the lottery this past December. The race starts on July 14th, this coming Friday! In three days, at 6am, I’ll jog out of Silverton, CO and begin a potentially 48 hour-long meditation on the phrase, “be careful what you wish for”. For anyone interested in following along, here are the relevant links: Runner tracking on OpenSplitTime My live-tracking splits and estimates Live race coverage by RunSteepGetHigh The course starts in Silverton and travels counter-clockwise through Lake City, Ouray and Telluride before aiming us back at Silverton, accumulating just over 33,000 feet of vertical gain along the way, all through terrain like this: ...

Wait long enough to write and the updates are bound to be interesting! I’ve gone through many lives since I last wrote, back in July of 2020, mid-pandemic. Leaving Google for… Computer Algebra? I quit my job at Google at the end of 2021. I’m not sure I ever wrote about starting this job back in 2019. Yes, for about 15 months I was a *Staff Research Engineer *at *Google X, *a dream job on paper! In reality, fairly pedestrian and factory-like. ...

I’m a big believer in off-the-couch adventures, and the idea of the “spot check”. If you invite me on an adventure for which I’m mildly unprepared, I’ll use my brain and say no. But if you ask me to do something that is obviously stupid given my lack of regular training, I can’t help but take it as a little test, a spot check from the universe, and say… yes. Please, please yes. ...

Humans have a strange relationship with reality. We’ve developed a large body of mathematical tools that sometimes seem to let us beat time. We can send spaceships out to take photos of distant planets, and be almost totally sure that they’ll make it. It takes minutes (seconds?) to simulate voyages of thousands of years. We can examine light from stars millions of light years away, and make good guesses about the stars’ ingredients. ...

I’ve had an odd, intellectual fever dream going for years now; I’d like to learn enough advanced math and physics to make my way through Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality, and not just understand it, but feel in my bones what it’s like to intuitively get our current best guess about how reality works. (If you haven’t heard of this book, or Roger Penrose, go check out the Amazon reviews, then listen to Penrose’s appearance on “The Portal“ podcast. He allegedly wrote this tour of all modern physics as a popular science book, but Penrose is so mis-calibrated, or optimistic, about non-Penrosian math ability that physics and math professors routinely flame out.) ...

Barry Green’s The Inner Game of Music is a lovely book about music, and practice, and the strange psychological battle that doing anything difficult and creative seems to require. Early in the book he lays out a very simple framework for how to think about why it’s so hard to learn new things and make progress on seemingly clear goals. Imagine two small people living in your head. One is named “Self Two”. Self Two is a cherub, an almost helplessly creative little kid, the source of every “what if” and impulse you’ve had to build and share anything. ...