Preah's Website 4 days ago

Running Regularly, And Other Habits

A few months ago, I started exercising regularly. I mean, I've been "exercising regularly" on and off for years, to no one's surprise, but I have been actually consistently doing it for probably my longest streak yet now. Also to no one's surprise, this has improved by mental and physical health, made me feel more confident, and expelled anxious energy. Here's a timeline of exercising in my life thus far: As a teen, my brother and his wife had a membership to a really bougie gym . I went sometimes, skinny as a twig, and thought it was pretty fun. They had a sauna, climbing wall, pool, hot yoga, guided cycling, the works. Eventually it cost too much money for my brother to continue going, and I didn't even attend that much anyway after a while. Use parents' home gym to work out every other weekday. Helped to be at home, as I have agoraphobic-adjacent tendencies, especially related to driving. Eventually they dismantled their home gym to use the room for something else. I used the free app Caliber to track and plan workouts, which I still recommend for people new to working out who don't know where to start. Lower standards for exercising and do it solely in my bedroom. I found that if I saw exercising as something you need a bunch of equipment and a gym for, it actually kept me from exercising more. I kept one pair of dumbbells in my room as my only equipment, and started working out every weekday. I was also off-put by having to change clothes to work out every day, since I get all sweaty, so I simply didn't wear clothes. That's uh, not something you can do at the gym. This is also when I started using the app Hevy , which I still use to this day. You can find curated workout routines for free and track them easily, with little videos on how to do sets. Get membership at Planet Fitness, because my job at the time covered gym expenses. This showed me the power of gyms, and how much easier they make working out. Having an actual treadmill, weights, and cycling machinery was awesome, and I started running the most I ever had since high school P.E class. I didn't do much strength training because I was (am) socially anxious and scared of people nearby. This was ultimately the downside of having a gym, because I had to drive to it. It wasn't that far, I just really am that anxious about driving. Present day, I use my fiancé's parents' home gym because it's on the same property. It has everything I need: dumbbells, treadmill, air conditioning. This means I now work out 4 days a week for an hour, which has been fantastic. I'm still working on being able to run longer and faster, and lifting more than 30 lbs. I do about 30-40 minutes strength training, and 20-30 minutes running usually. When I'm really feeling unmotivated, sometimes I only run, or I do high-incline walking instead of running if my leg muscles are feeling sensitive. From the beginning, the point was very much just doing some exercise each day, no matter how small. A walk, 10 minutes at the gym, whatever, just go do it . I can't really say it has gotten much easier to exercise; I'm procrastinating going to work out this second, writing this post... Something that helps me go do something I am mentally resisting doing, such as working out, has been to-do lists. This doesn't work for everyone, but I've found that having an annoying notification on my phone, set to repeat every day, gets me to Do The Thing. The satisfaction of clearing that day's tasks is phenomenal as well. I use Todoist for this. The free plan is more than enough for me, personally, and I even have a shared to-do list I share with my fiancé. This includes a grocery list, upcoming plans with friends and family, and a whole shared project just for wedding planning. My routines include simple stuff for now, such as working out, reading scriptures for 30 minutes 1 , and attending catechumen class every Wednesday at 20:00. Having a to-do list for my habits has been immensely useful, especially sorting them by day of the week, and having individual Home/School/Work projects. Hopefully I'll keep exercising like I am, and maybe even more, with more motivation. Subscribe via email or RSS If you're curious, I use the Orthodox Study Bible , and am a catechumen of the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church currently, under the OCA jurisdiction. My religious journey/life is a whole thing that I'm not sure I'll post much about besides references, but feel free to email/Signal me about it if you're interested. ↩ As a teen, my brother and his wife had a membership to a really bougie gym . I went sometimes, skinny as a twig, and thought it was pretty fun. They had a sauna, climbing wall, pool, hot yoga, guided cycling, the works. Eventually it cost too much money for my brother to continue going, and I didn't even attend that much anyway after a while. Use parents' home gym to work out every other weekday. Helped to be at home, as I have agoraphobic-adjacent tendencies, especially related to driving. Eventually they dismantled their home gym to use the room for something else. I used the free app Caliber to track and plan workouts, which I still recommend for people new to working out who don't know where to start. Lower standards for exercising and do it solely in my bedroom. I found that if I saw exercising as something you need a bunch of equipment and a gym for, it actually kept me from exercising more. I kept one pair of dumbbells in my room as my only equipment, and started working out every weekday. I was also off-put by having to change clothes to work out every day, since I get all sweaty, so I simply didn't wear clothes. That's uh, not something you can do at the gym. This is also when I started using the app Hevy , which I still use to this day. You can find curated workout routines for free and track them easily, with little videos on how to do sets. Get membership at Planet Fitness, because my job at the time covered gym expenses. This showed me the power of gyms, and how much easier they make working out. Having an actual treadmill, weights, and cycling machinery was awesome, and I started running the most I ever had since high school P.E class. I didn't do much strength training because I was (am) socially anxious and scared of people nearby. This was ultimately the downside of having a gym, because I had to drive to it. It wasn't that far, I just really am that anxious about driving. Present day, I use my fiancé's parents' home gym because it's on the same property. It has everything I need: dumbbells, treadmill, air conditioning. This means I now work out 4 days a week for an hour, which has been fantastic. I'm still working on being able to run longer and faster, and lifting more than 30 lbs. I do about 30-40 minutes strength training, and 20-30 minutes running usually. When I'm really feeling unmotivated, sometimes I only run, or I do high-incline walking instead of running if my leg muscles are feeling sensitive. If you're curious, I use the Orthodox Study Bible , and am a catechumen of the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church currently, under the OCA jurisdiction. My religious journey/life is a whole thing that I'm not sure I'll post much about besides references, but feel free to email/Signal me about it if you're interested. ↩

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DYNOMIGHT 2 weeks ago

Shoes, Algernon, Pangea, and Sea Peoples

I fear we are in the waning days of the People Read Blog Posts About Random Well-Understood Topics Instead of Asking Their Automatons Era. So before I lose my chance, here is a blog post about some random well-understood topics. You probably know that people can now run marathons in just over 2 hours. But do you realize how insane that is? That’s an average speed of 21.1 km per hour, or 13.1 miles per hour. You can think of that as running a mile in 4:35 (world record: 3:45 ), except doing it 26.2 times in a row. Or, you can think of that as running 100 meters in 17.06 seconds (world record: 9.58 seconds ), except doing it 421.6 times in a row. I’d guess that only around half of the people reading this could run 100 meters in 17.06 seconds once . This crazy marathon running speed is mostly due to humans being well-adapted for running and generally tenacious. But some of it is due to new shoes with carbon-fiber plates that came out in the late 2010s. The theory behind these shoes is quite interesting. When you run, you mainly use four joints: If you haven’t heard of the last of these, they’re pronounced “ met -uh-tar-so-fuh- lan -jee-ul” or “MTP”. These are the joints inside your feet behind your big toes. Besides sounding made-up, they’re different from the other joints in a practical way: The other joints are all attached to large muscles and tendons that stretch out and return energy while running sort of like springs. These can apparently recover around 60% of the energy expended in each stride. (Kangaroos seemingly do even better .) But the MTP joints are only attached to small muscles and tendons, so the energy that goes into them is mostly lost. These new shoe designs have complex constructions of foam and plates that can do the same job as the MTP joints, but—unlike the MTP joints—store and return that energy to the runner. A recent meta-analysis estimated that this reduced total oxygen consumption by ~2.7% and marathon times by ∼2.18%. I wonder if these shoes are useful as a test case for the Algernon argument . In general, that argument is that there shouldn’t be any simple technology that would make humans dramatically smarter, since if there was, then evolution would have already found it. You can apply the same kind of argument to running: We have been optimized very hard by evolution to be good at running, so there shouldn’t be any “easy” technologies that would make us dramatically faster or more efficient. In the context of the shoes, I think that argument does… OK? The shoes definitely help. But carbon fiber plates are pretty hard to make, and the benefit is pretty modest. Maybe this is some evidence that Algernon isn’t a hard “wall”, but rather a steep slope. Or, perhaps thinking is just different from running. If you start running , you will get better at it, in a way that spills over into lots of other physical abilities. But there doesn’t seem to be any cognitive task that you can practice and make yourself better at other cognitive tasks. If you have some shoes that will make me 2.7% smarter, I’ll buy them. Pangea was a supercontinent that contained roughly all the land on Earth. At the beginning of the Jurassic 200 million years ago, it broke up and eventually formed the current continents. But isn’t the Earth 4.5 billion years old? Why would all the land stick together for 95% of that time and then suddenly break up? The accepted theory is that it didn’t. Instead, it’s believed that Earth cycles between super-continents and dispersed continents, and Pangea is merely the most recent super-continent. But why would there be such a cycle? We can break that down into two sub-questions. First, why would dispersed continents fuse together into a supercontinent? Well, you can think of the Earth as a big ball of rock, warmed half by primordial heat from when the planet formed and half by radioactive decay. Since the surface is exposed to space, it cools, resulting in solid chunks that sort of slide around on the warm magma in the upper mantle. Some of those chunks are denser than others, which causes them to sink into the mantle a bit and get covered with water. So when a “land chunk” crashes into a “water chunk”, the land chunk slides on top. But if two land chunks crash into each other, they tend to crumple together into mountains and stick to each other. You can see this by comparing this map of all the current plates: To this map of elevation: OK, but once a super-continent forms, why would it break apart? Well, compared to the ocean floor, land chunks are thicker and lighter. So they trap heat from inside the planet sort of like a blanket. With no cool ocean floor sliding back into the warm magma beneath, that magma keeps getting warmer and warmer. After tens of millions of years, it heats up so much that it stretches the land above and finally rips it apart. It’s expected that a new supercontinent “Pangea Ultima” will form in 250 million years. By that time, the sun will be putting out around 2.3% more energy, making things hotter. On top of that, it’s suspected that Pangea Ultima, for extremely complicated reasons , will greatly increase the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere, likely making the planet uninhabitable by mammals. So we’ve got that going for us. The Sea Peoples are a group of people from… somewhere… that appeared in the Eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC and left a trail of destruction from modern Turkey down to modern Egypt. They are thought to be either a cause or symptom of the Late Bronze Age collapse . But did you know the Egyptians made carvings of the situation while they were under attack? Apparently the battle looked like this : In the inscription, Pharaoh Ramesses III reports: Those who reached my boundary, their seed is not; their hearts and their souls are finished forever and ever. As for those who had assembled before them on the sea, the full flame was their front before the harbor mouths, and a wall of metal upon the shore surrounded them. They were dragged, overturned, and laid low upon the beach; slain and made heaps from stern to bow of their galleys, while all their things were cast upon the water. Metatarsophalangeal

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Herman's blog 1 months ago

The ROI of exercise

I workout 4 days a week and I love it. It's the foundation of my morning routine, following spending 45 minutes drinking coffee on the couch and watching the sun come up with Emma. I've been doing this for a few years now and while I struggled (as everyone does) in the beginning, I can't imagine not exercising in the morning now. On the rare occasion that I do skip a workout, I feel it missing throughout the day as a lack of vitality and less mental clarity. Let's perform a thought experiment to work out the return on investment of exercise. For this let's first assume that exercise does nothing else but expand your lifespan (not extend; since it's not just adding frail years to the end but instead injects extra years in each stage of life). We can ignore the effects it has on strength, focus, feelings of accomplishment, and mental health for now. It's well understood that a good exercise routine is a mixture of strength, mobility, and cardio; and is performed at a decent intensity for 2-4 days a week for at least 45 minutes. This could be a combination of weight lifting, yoga, running, tennis, hiking, or whatever floats your boat. This totals about 3 hours a week, or 156 hours per year. If we extrapolate that over an adult lifetime, that's about 8,500 hours of exercise, or about a year of solid physical activity.

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neilzone 1 months ago

My third Airsoft game day and perhaps I am finally getting the hang of it

I played my third Airsoft game day today, at Red Alert, near Thatcham, again. It was great fun, and, for the first time, I felt that I might be getting the hang of Airsoft. Sure, it is just running around and shooting toy guns at each other, but the first couple of times, I really had no clue what was going on, or what to do. This time was a lot better. I did have to fight a bit with my safety glasses sweating up today, and I spent part of one of the games with less than ideal vision, but I was still reasonably effective. I resorted to a sort of headband, but over my forehead, and that worked pretty well. As it gets cooler, perhaps this will become less of a problem. I played more aggressively than before, in terms of running up and taking on the opposition. I did this whether I was attacking or defending, so more of the “front line” than hanging around at the back. I guess that I was less worried about being hit, and more keen to be involved. It doesn’t hurt too much, and I go back to respawn and start again. I think that not having to think quite so much about the mechanics of the rifle helped, as I could just get on and use it, and focus on other things. Getting used to the site layout is helpful. I also tried to make use of some of the things that I had been taught in the practice evenings, especially use of cover, which definitely helped. I spent some time being sneaky and taking the long way round to flank the enemy to attack from their rear, which was also fun, but it takes a long time to walk back to respawn, which (especially on a hot day, as today was) was a bit of a pain. But I got some sneaky kills in that way. I’m still getting used to the range of my rifle, which is a lot less than I had expected. I don’t think that it is a particularly bad rifle / range - it is not noticeably worse than other people’s similar rifles - but it is just less than I would have thought. I did pretty well with it, in terms of the number of kills, so I have no real complaints. I am not looking to spend much more money on a nascent hobby at the moment, but I could be tempted to upgrade the spring and see if that has a positive effect (within chrono limits for the site). The first two times, I played on semi-automatic the whole time (one BB per pull of the trigger). This time, I experimented with full auto, so BBs firing for as long as I keep the trigger depressed. I firing no more than three or four rounds at a time (short bursts), and that worked quite well. It did mean that I got through a lot more ammunition - about £10 worth, by my estimation. Some games, I got through three hicap magazines, and into a fourth. A sling has made a massive difference, in terms of comfort, and I’ve experimented with the attachment points. This has been a good additional purchase. I think I’d like to give pyrotechnics a go at some point. Smoke grenades, or perhaps a frag grenade. But that feels like an unnecessary distraction at the moment, and I should get better with my rifle first. Not terrible, but definitely room for improvement. I did quite a bit of running, and sprinting between cover, but by the end of the day, I was definitely feeling it.

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Weakty 7 months ago

What's 10k in Vegas?

I can't say I love Las Vegas. But I'm here. And I will say it's nice to be outside in a t-shirt after weeks of snow and ice in Toronto. I'm here for a work retreat, but I also came a day early to participate in the Las Vegas half marathon/10k. I'll probably be doing the 10k today, even though I signed up for the half. I just didn't get the training I needed, and I also hurt my back last week. Doing a half marathon isn't maybe the smartest idea, especially before a work retreat.

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Andrey Petrov - Shazow 8 months ago

Conditioning

I think of conditioning as a long-term conversation between decentralized components. After breaking my foot, I’ve been working on conditioning all of the tiny ligaments to properly support movements and impacts I haven’t practiced in months. I can’t just say “hey foot, you’re not broken anymore, go back to normal.” I have to slowly and incrementally reinforce each change. Similar to learning a musical instrument by training our fingers to move a specific way, over and over – we’re telling all of the related “muscle memory” that this is an important motion we need to be good at. Like lifting weights, we’re telling the muscle “you’re going to continually exceed your capacity, so get bigger and stronger.” It’s not just a one-and-done: Conditioning takes time and repetition, because the channel is low-bandwidth and lossy, and the micro-changes required are many and sequential. When we train our dog to not be reactive about visitors (or to salivate when the bell rings), we can use positive reinforcement to rewire the brain with the help of oxytocin signals. Treats, “good dog”, or even hugs can all be forms of communicating that the precursor to some stressor is actually okay. Just like humans working with a therapist, we try to condition the sources of our anxieties to take on different frames (or acclimate to our fears). Similar to positive reinforcement with oxytocin, there is cortisol and dopamine and other hormones/neurotransmitters which communicate desirable/undesirable conditioning between different aspects of our minds and bodies. I really like the model that we’re not monoliths, but rather a bunch of disparate components who are stuck together. Our brain can’t simply tell our body to shed fat and build muscle, our tic disorder to chill out, our ligaments to support wider range of motion… but our brain can slowly and methodically facilitate these changes by communicating them through conditioning! What does this mean for society? If we break out of the monolith mindset of our bodies, we can also think of communities, corporations, nations, species as “mega organisms” who suffer from inefficient/indirect communication. We may condition our societies towards democratic practices or into accepting authoritarian rule. To justice or inequity. It can happen slowly through reinforcement, or it can snap like a bone breaking from ever-increasing pressure. Those suffering may ache like a festering infection, but we can acclimate (or amputate). What’s the difference between Jeff Bezos and a rando who woke up with a hundred billion dollars? Bezos has preconditioned infrastructure to achieve his endeavours. He can take on logistics, media, space exploration, investment, and who knows what else. What can rando do without spending months/years “conditioning” their assets to support their endeavours? Just think of how long it would take to even hire a sizeable team of good people! This is conditioning. In many ways, the peripersonal space of powerful individuals expands far beyond their wealth. It extends to that which they have conditioned to advance their pursuits. I want us to condition ourselves out of thinking like monoliths. How do we do that? We should condition ourselves to think in terms of conditioning, rather than quick drastic swings that bring injury after injury. (“We need to be good at lifting heavy weights, so we should lift the heavy weights immediately.”) We can set ambitious goals that are beyond the ability of a single component, or even a single person or nation, and we need to figure out how to communicate them properly to all participants–repeatedly, consistently! All participants need to practice them, repeatedly and consistently! Let’s not ignore our pains, but take time to listen and understand where the pain is really coming from and why, and how to address it. But most importantly: Recognize when we’re being conditioned into something we don’t want to be.

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Phil Eaton 9 months ago

Picking up volleyball in NYC with Goodrec and New York Urban

I was so intimidated to go at first, but it is in fact easy and fun to start playing beginner volleyball in New York. The people are so friendly and welcoming that it has been easy to keep playing consistently every week since I started for the first time this August. It's been a great workout and a great way to make friends! The two platforms I've used to find volleyball games are Goodrec and New York Urban . While these platforms may also offer classes and leagues, I mostly use them to play "pickup" games. Pickup games are where you show up and join (or get assigned to) a team to play for an hour or two. Easy to go on your own or with friends. I'm not an expert! My only hope with this post is that maybe it makes trying out volleyball in New York feel a little less intimidating for you! With Goodrec you have to use their mobile app. Beginner tier is called "social" on Goodrec. So browse available games until you find one at the level you want to play. You enroll in (buy a place in) sessions individually. Sessions are between 90-120 minutes long. They ask you not to arrive more than 10 minutes early at the gym. When you arrive you tell the gym managers (usually in a desk up front somewhere) you're there for Goodrec and the tier (in case the gym has multiple level games going on at the same time). Then you wait until the Goodrec "host" arrives and they will organize everyone into teams. Goodrec hosts are players who volunteer to organize the games. They'll explain the rules of the game (makes Goodrec very good for beginners) and otherwise help you out. Always say thank you to your host! With New York Urban, pickup sessions are called "open play" . There is no mobile app, you just use the website to purchase a spot in a session. The sessions are longer and cheaper than Goodrec. But there is no host; players self-organize. The options are more limited too. You play at one of four high schools on either a Friday night or on Sunday. And session slots tend to sell out much more quickly than with Goodrec. You can also check out Big City Volleyball but I haven't used it yet. I haven't ever done Volo but I think I've heard it described as "beer league". That even some of the beginner tier sessions with Goodrec and New York Urban are more competitive. But also, Volo is built around leagues so you have to get the timing right. Goodrec's and New York Urban's pickup games make it easy to get started playing any time of year. It was super awkward to go at first! I went by myself. I didn't know what I was doing. I couldn't remember, and didn't know, many rules. I didn't have court shoes or knee pads. But the Goodrec host system is particularly great for bringing beginners in and making them feel welcome. You have a great time even if you're terrible. The first game I went to, I tried to hang out afterward to meet people. But people either came with their SO or with their friends or by themselves so they all just left immediately or hung out in their group. So you can't just go once and expect to make friends immediately. But if you keep going at the same place and time regularly week over week, you'll see familiar faces. Maybe half the people I play with each week are regulars. If you're friendly you'll start making friends with these people and eventually start going out to bars with them after the games. Even if you find yourself embarrassingly bad at first, just keep going! I'm 29, 6'1, 190lbs and from observation the past 5 months, age, height, and weight have a very indirect relation to playing ability. Most of the people who play are self-taught, especially at the lower tiers I've played at. But some people played for the school team in high school or college. These people are fun to play with and you can learn a lot from them. Most people who are self-taught seem to watch YouTube videos like Coach Donny , helpful for learning how to serve, set, block, etc. Or they take "clinics" (classes) with Goodrec or other platforms. (I have no idea about these, I've never done them before.) At first I played 2 hours a week and I was completely exhausted after the session. Over time it got easier so I started playing 2-3 sessions a week (6-9-ish hours). With practice and consistency (after about 3-4 months), I started playing Intermediate tier with Goodrec and New York Urban. And I don't think I'll play Beginner/Social at all anymore. I still primarily play for fun and for the workout and to meet people. But it's also fun to get better! I played with one person much better than myself in an Intermediate session one time and he mentioned he will probably stop playing Intermediate and only play High Intermediate. He mentioned you get better when you keep pushing yourself to play with better and better players. Good advice! I wrote a little post on picking up volleyball in new york. It's fun, and a great workout, and you meet interesting people! https://t.co/jEWHbRWF6C pic.twitter.com/ipuIUB1ZnM

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Daniel Mangum 12 months ago

Is It Better to Fail Spectacularly?

Three weeks ago I wrote the following draft of a blog post entitled “Is It Better to Fail Spectacularly?”. I am having a lot of doubts. I’ve been training for the Chicago Marathon in earnest since June, but in reality the preparations began a year ago when I was accepted based on my qualifying time from the 2023 Ventura Marathon. I don’t have doubt that I can run a marathon. I have run three in the last year and a half, and I routinely go on weekend long runs that approach or surpass 20 miles.

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Weakty 1 years ago

The 2024 Kawartha Bike Tour

Sometime at the end of 2023, Chad started planning some possible routes for a group bike tour. In the late winter of 2024, people started to agree on a possible weekend as well as the tour that we would do. We landed on a four-day Kawartha bike tour that touched several rail trails, starting in Barrie to Orillia, then to Lindsay, and finally ending in Whitby.

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Alex Molas 1 years ago

Win your fantasy league using operations research

I’ve never been good at playing football 1. I started playing again last year and I have scored more own goals than goals for my team. Also, I support the RCD Espanyol 2, which has spent last season in the second division and has miraculously ascended to the first division last week. And to be honest, I only watch games to spend time with my friends and family. So it’s not a secret that I’m not a football expert, and I have no shame in admitting it. But I’m very competitive. So when my friends invited me to a football fantasy league 3 some years ago I said “yes, and I’m going to wipe the floor with you, losers!”. I’m from Spain, so I’m speaking about the real and original football, the one that’s played with the foot and a ball, not with the hands and an egg. ↩ See point 54 in my 100 list. ↩ “A fantasy sport (also known less commonly as rotisserie or roto) is a game, often played using the Internet, where participants assemble imaginary or virtual teams composed of proxies of real players of a professional sport. These teams compete based on the statistical performance of those players in actual games.” Source. ↩

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kytta 1 years ago

How I've grown to like football

Here’s a sentence I’d never thought I’d be saying at any point in my life: Yeah, I’ve watched the Germany game with friends, and then we went to the bar. It had no TV, though, so I’ve watched the France vs. Portugal game on my phone. When I was young, I didn’t like football. In fact, I didn’t really like any sport, but football especially. Growing up, it was the most popular team sport across my peeps. It was unavoidable: Kids of my age would play it in PE and in their free time. And I used to hate it a lot. I was never really interested in football, so never bothered to learn the rules. I was also not good at running and kicking, so my classmates never picked me for their teams. That was a win-win situation at the time — I didn’t have to play, and they didn’t have to endure my awful skills — but it still left a mark on me. I was alone; I simply used to go home when others proposed to play football. The same goes for watching the matches. I found the whole act rather boring: the field is too big, so the players spend most of the time running around, and since Russia was never really that good, it rarely came to goal celebrations. I’ve ignored most games, unless it was running in the background. And as a teenager, I was quite snide about it, too. My behaviour has started to change in 2018, when Russia hosted the World Cup, and my city was one of the hosts. The city changed a lot during this time: new streets, parks, and decorations were put in place, and more and more signs appeared with English text on them — a novelty! And then, when thousands of foreigners poured in, I started to like it even more. There were so many people from all over the world, and many conversations were and could have been had — I still kinda regret not being a volunteer that year. This is when I started to follow the championship, albeit lightly: I watched all Russian games, until they were knocked out, and I was mourning the devastating GER—KOR game. This was the first time I’ve felt the football uniting people. Of course, the world is nothing like back in 2018. COVID, war, and the controversial Qatar World Cup took the joy of football away. There were not many football fans among my newly made German friends either. And it was less than a month before the kick-off when I learned that Euro 2024 would take place in Germany. I checked the list of venues, thanked God for no games being played near me, and continued to ignore it. On the day of the first Euro 2024 game, I was in Berlin with a couple of friends of mine. We’ve had a long day behind us, and we wanted to go to a Belgian bar ( can recommend ) for a dubbel or two. On our way from the tram station, I observed the Germans watching the game. Almost everyone living in the ground floor had their TV standing on the windowsill, with five to ten tenants sitting outside on a tiny bench, watching the ball being kicked around. This was a peculiar sight; something I’ve never seen in Russia or after having had moved to Germany. There was something incredibly human, communal about this, and I loved to just see it. The bar was packed with people, and all of them were watching the game, too. It was relatively late in the game when we walked in, and Germany was already leading 3-0. I was irritated about there being too many people, but I guess the beer let me rethink this. With every minute, I looked more and more often at the screen. 4-0 was met with a euphoria. 4-1 caused some head shakes, and 5-1 was the final nail in the coffin of both the Scottish team and my disinterest in football. From that point on, I was looking forward to the games. I didn’t expect to start liking football, and even less did I expect to also be interested in teams other than Germany. After Germany lost in that game yesterday (I’m blaming the referee, y’all), it could be over, but it somehow wasn’t. Two hours later, I was sitting with a group of friends at a bar table. One eye followed the Doppelkopf game, the other followed the penalty shoot-out between France and Portugal. And even this post was written by me with ENG—SUI running on the second monitor. And I really am starting to get a hang of this; or at least, I’m beginning to understand why others like it so much. But alas, I don’t think it’s a universal thing; I don’t think I’m an ultimate football fan now. There is still a lot to criticize about the sports, and I won’t go over every controversial aspect of it. And I still heavily dislike the regional football for being too polarizing among the fans. And, of course, I would never even think of watching the games, hadn’t it been for the fact that they take place in the country I live in. But hey, it is fun while it lasts, and I’m all there for it.

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Daniel Mangum 1 years ago

Reflections on Running 3,000 Miles in 2023

I spent the final week of 2022 feeling extremely sick, mostly confined to a bed. I was particularly disappointed in getting sick at that point in the year given that I was wrapping up the best running year of my life. I was very consistent with training, ran a few races, and was closing in on 1,400 miles. I am a big proponent of setting ambitious goals, and will go to pretty extreme lengths to reach them.

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Alex Molas 2 years ago

How far can you jump from a swing?

In this post I derive the physics of pumping a swing and the physics of jumping from a swing. Then, using both pieces I compute the optimal strategy of jumping from a swing to maximize the traveled distance. I propose this game as a new Olympic sport.

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