Back to Regular Hiking Training

The temperatures have moderated, the ice and snow are gone, but the heavy cloud cover remains. Without sun, there are no "pretty" hikes. The clouds, however, are gorgeous.

I'm back to my fast-stepped mountain hikes. My favorite is a 6 1/2 to 7 mile round trip. Half of that is a 500-700 foot climb, then the second half is flat and downhill. To motivate me, I took an mp3 player and Stevie Nicks, Barry White and other 112-130 bpm songs. It's tough to keep that pace uphill and for that long. Hills provide good training, and fast pacing makes it so, plus the sentiment of "My Everything" when applied to a Higher Power is uplifting and thus further motivational. This fast-paced baseline/calibration hike keeps me breathless but usually results in around an hour and 42 minutes, including breaks. The resultant computation is 3.8 mph overall, which is a blazing fast hike, although not a run.

It provides good training but, this early in the season, tires me and makes me sore. It is a prelude to longer hikes, which have to be fast in order to get them done in a day. My favorite local long hike is Flat Rock at 14 miles and 2400 climb-feet in a leisurely 7 hours. Reaching Red Lizard is even more challenging. These long local hikes themselves are training to be able to hike the real mountains in Rockies, Yosemite, Whites and wherever.

Challenge and training go together.

- © 2011 by Willy

Did Watson Really Win?

So, "Watson," the IBM mainframe with artificial intelligence won at Jeopardy against the two best human opponents. It also thought Toronto was a "US City" (the category) and got every question wrong on "Month," a five-in-twelve guess! IBM will surely tout it as a PR win, but it was a dreadful performance for 25 scientists, four years of hard work and a mega-million bucks. Watson should have answered every question right, and first. I have a sneaky suspicion that, given a learning curve, the two humans could have beaten Watson, but that would not have been good PR.

Why did Watson do so badly?

The engineer would say that you're always one transistor away from failure. The athlete that he's one injury away from a loss. The old that he's one sickness away from bankruptcy. Algorithm guys should say they are one human away from being human. Humans think conceptually, whereas machines exhaust logic trees by brute force. Deep Blue beat Kasparov but Eliza is awful. Machines are profoundly ignorant of what humans take for granted. There's a lot of stuff we know that we don't even know we know.

Watson did badly because our AI algorithms just aren't there yet.

Should we worry about our own idiocy instead? What about our own human thinking, which only works when void of emotion? Should we work on our mental health instead of developing artificial intelligence?

Further, Watson really did not play against two humans... rather, Watson and the two humans played Jeopardy, with little interaction. The devil is in the interaction. For instance, even if we hold out for perfection, it may be that perfection is holding out for perfection too... and not us. And we may not recognize perfection even if it whacked us in the head.

One final point: There's a lot of difference between losing and being a loser. The two Jeopardy humans are not losers, and neither should we call ourselves that. Imperfect works just fine, and it's human. Perfection is God's business. We should be proud of being human... accepting, embracing it and applauding it.

We don't yet have to worry about machines taking over the world... no Terminator scenario yet... but Watson did well for a four-year-old toddler.

- text © 2011 by Willy

Pre-emptive Strike

I left work a little bit early yesterday when the sleet started. Yesterday's frozen precip froze into solid ice sheets overnight, so it looked like yet another boring day at home today. I did have two technical reports to work on, but then I had them a month ago when I got trapped home for three days.

So, in 20 degrees and some wind, I slipped my reports into a backpack, dressed in boots and down, and hiked down my hill to my favorite coffee shop (with binoculars, I could see cars at the coffee shop, so it was open). It was a nice adventure, even though it was only a couple of miles. I walked on crunchy frozen grass and slipped a couple of times at driveways. At the coffee shop I sat by a window, had breakfast AND lunch while working on the reports, and even took a picture of the house.

It felt good to have fought my anxieties with this preemptive strike. It was exhilarating... no feelings of being trapped today.

I was thinking of walking to the gym afterwards but reduced the risk and just went home instead. It was another couple of miles and maybe a 400' climb to get back. Tomorrow morning's early spin class will come soon enough, and things have dried out enough by tonight to drive, even though temps will be in the teens. Besides, I hiked 5 hours on Sunday, lifted Monday and yesterday, and did abs and step classes on Tuesday.

Being proactive and preemptive is the solution for the heebie-jeebies, whether trapped at home or trapped in a relationship, and makes for good mental health.

- © 2011 by Willy

P.S., I'm confused. I thought I lived in the south, so what's with this continuing snow and ice?

Dallas Waxing Eloquently

OK, so I've weightlifted with my buddy Dallas for twenty years now. He's usually quiet but every now and then the Holy Spirit comes out and he gets philosophical. That happened tonight.

I mentioned that I did not want to hurt this massage therapist's feelings and Dallas responded with "Did you miss your first day of Codependents Anonymous? Where you stood up and said 'Hi, I'm Willy, and I am not responsible for anybody else's feelings.'" "Oh!" I said, "Let me write that down... that's good," as I reached for my cell phone while he did some reps.

That wound him up and he hardly paused, continuing, "I remember Doctor Smith telling me the three different types of dependency:"

Lord, I trust you to take care of me, and not some other things or people. - Prayer of the dependent.

Lord I trust you to take care of me, and not me take care of me. - Prayer of the overly independent.

Lord I trust you to take care of the people that you bring into my life, and not me take care of them (don't be quick to take care of them). - Prayer of the Codependent.

"Unconditional love is a fantasy. People can't do it. Can only get it from God. God desires to fill my vacuum. People try to fill it with drugs, sex, money, muscles and etc." Amen to that, brother.