Week 2: When To Add Intensity

Last week I initiated a new training regimen for myself. This is not marathon training, nor is it beginner training. This is some steady training to keep myself in shape as I get settled in my new home. As I described last week, the various obligations and tasks I have to complete related to moving to a new country are keeping me very busy, which means I am training on a more limited time schedule.

My first week went okay. It was a bit of a bump up in terms of strength training, relative to what I had been doing previously. My overall running mileage continues to be low; but that is by necessity, due to time constraints and the summer heat around here.

Underpinning this training regimen is the basic philosophy idea that I am not training for a race any time soon, but that I would like to maintain as high a level of fitness as possible. I therefore have a little ground to give when it comes to running mileage, and a little ground to gain when it comes to strength training. I will focus on building some good upper body strength, and perhaps a little muscle while I’m at it. I’ll take the running as it comes; currently, I only have a short period of time in the early morning in which to get any running done at all. There isn’t enough time in the evenings for a good, solid run, and I have to get out the door as early as possible in the morning in order to beat the rush hour traffic both to and from work.

Increase the Effort, or Not?

I would like to provide a small window into the decision-making process in terms of knowing when to add intensity and when not to.

I started last week with the understanding that I needed to add intensity. I knew it was time because my daily strength training regimen had become incredibly easy for me. It was no longer a physical challenge. The only difficult part was having enough will power to do what I needed to do every day. I was starting to stagnate. My body was no longer showing signs of progress, and in fact was showing signs of deterioration. (If you never increase the intensity, the efficiency of your movements will start to undermine the physical effort involved, giving you an ever-easier workout.) Clearly, I needed a new challenge.

Having undertaken it for a week, I can now pause to assess whether or not to increase the intensity some more. The answer is “Not yet,” but why?

First, I do not yet feel comfortable with my new routine. It is still difficult to complete every time I do it. Second, my blood sugar hasn’t normalized to my new routine yet. (You non-diabetics have the disadvantage of less information in this case.) Third, I am never quite sure if I am going to be able to complete the whole workout every day, at least not without compromising the next day’s workout.

On the plus side, my muscles and joints are not at all sore. So while I have increased the intensity, I have not increased it to the point of pain. It’s always a tough balance to strike, and it looks like I managed to do it this time.

Neil Peart, Ayn Rand, and Bleeding-Heart Libertarianism

Here's an excerpt from a recent interview with Neil Peart, drummer of the band Rush, who famously wrote lyrics inspired by the writings of Ayn Rand in the 1970s:

This is somewhat random, but you were interested in the writings of Ayn Rand decades ago. Do her words still speak to you?
Oh, no. That was 40 years ago. But it was important to me at the time in a transition of finding myself and having faith that what I believed was worthwhile. I had come up with that moral attitude about music, and then in my late teens I moved to England to seek fame and fortune and all that, and I was kind of stunned by the cynicism and the factory-like atmosphere of the music world over there, and it shook me. I'm thinking, "Am I wrong? Am I stupid and naïve? This is the way that everybody does everything and, had I better get with the program?"

For me, it was an affirmation that it's all right to totally believe in something and live for it and not compromise. It was a simple as that. On that 2112 album, again, I was in my early twenties. I was a kid. Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal – because I'm an idealist. Paul Theroux's definition of a cynic is a disappointed idealist. So as you go through past your twenties, your idealism is going to be disappointed many many times. And so, I've brought my view and also – I've just realized this – Libertarianism as I understood it was very good and pure and we're all going to be successful and generous to the less fortunate and it was, to me, not dark or cynical. But then I soon saw, of course, the way that it gets twisted by the flaws of humanity. And that's when I evolve now into . . . a bleeding heart Libertarian. That'll do.

This response is of obvious interest to me because of my own relationship to the works of Ayn Rand.

I was a rabid Rand fan in my late teens and early twenties. While I have gone through periods of ebbing and flowing with respect to adhering to the principles of Objectivism, I don't think I have ever yet reached a point where I could say that her words no longer speak to me.

Part of that may be because my idealism has never been "disappointed." My ideology doesn't always win every battle, but even when it loses, it still remains true.

Part of that may also be due to the fact that I can easily separate Rand's polemics from her actual ideas. Like many people I know, Rand seemed to be someone who spoke harshly first, and then justified the harshness of it later. She was forced into a situation in which she always had to defend her ideas, and when that happens, a person starts to become extremely polemic. So when I read Rand these days, it's more than the literal truth to me; rather, it's a series of ideas conveyed by a very opinionated person with a gift for eloquent and fiery language.

And of course, the other major part of my adherence to Ayn Rand's ideas is the fact that I have investigated a great deal of the source material. Rand described herself as a writer first, and then a philosopher. She is often criticized as a philosopher; she is seldom criticized as a writer.

Like anyone who has a real day-job, she understands less about her hobbies than people who engage in those hobbies as a full-time day-job. But inasmuch as she managed to fuse together the important teachings of Aristotelian logic and the classical liberal tradition, she stood alone in her time. Nowadays, there are so many libertarian thinkers out there that we all have a tendency to forget Rand's role in sparking the modern movement.

And of course, the Rothbard crowd still won't call off their dogs. In a few decades, they will have probably managed to write her out of the history entirely.

So, to sum up... I still like Rand's ideas, but I've delved much deeper than that now. They were a great introduction. The source material is richer. None of this makes Rand bad.

Lubos Motl Explores the Epistemology of Mysticism

Lubos Motl has written a fascinating blog post exploring the epistemology of mysticism. "Epistemology of mysticism" is my term. Motl just thinks he's trying to explain the mindset of people who reject science for one reason or another.

He begins by laying out the core assumption that learning to think scientifically is something that people must do prior to puberty, otherwise they will spend a lifetime rejecting it. He then proceeds to elaborate on this by laying out a few tiers of unscientific (or anti-scientific?) thought.

The first is based on superstition:

I believe that the deliberate priority of various superstitions, obsolete religious dogmas or, on the contrary, newly created religious superstitions such as a frying Earth and so on are seriously lowering the efficiency with which most people on Earth use their brains. For all of them, the world is full of witches, homeopathic solutions, prophets, dowsing sticks, lucky numbers, geopathogenic zones, miracles, divine truths revealed to shamans, tipping points leading to the Armageddon, and so on. Scientists – people who actually try to use brains, logic, and mathematics applied to the observations – are just some exotic freaks who deserve humiliation and who can't ever reach the glory of the true leaders such as the witches and prophets. Many of these 5+ billion people would be capable of disproving this opinion of theirs if they tried (and if they decided not to fool themselves) but they just don't want to try. They have already made their mind – either individually or they were forced to adopt it – and doubting it would mean for them to undermine their own spiritual existence which is what they don't want to do.

This is a pretty important point. Motl describes both a prevailing cultural bias against science, and a deliberate choice made by unscientific people to refuse to question their own mysticism. He then shifts gears and addresses people "who superficially claim that they want to pursue the scientific method but they don't."

The second tier of unscientific thought is the rejection of mathematical logic. What he says in this section is a bit hard to excerpt or condense. Motl points out that there are

...people who don't think or who don't "agree" that our knowledge or their knowledge about the world may be organized into propositions that are either right or wrong or something in between but whose validity may be, in principle, studied, whose validity matters, which can a priori be right or wrong, and which may be correlated with other propositions by the rules of mathematical logic.

This, I think, describes it best. You may have heard people frantically insist that "people aren't numbers" with respect to conclusions from economics. You have heard people dismiss all questions of their own personal viewpoints as "just one opinion." To these folks, everything is a matter of opinion - there is no such thing as right-and-wrong at all. It's all opinion.

A third tier is what Ayn Rand termed context-dropping, although Motl seems to be unaware of Rand's work on the topic.

I decided to insert this short section that covers two errors that are opposite to one another.... The first error is that many people try to answer a question but they ignore other questions that are demonstrably relevant; the second error is that they fail to stop talking about questions that are demonstrably irrelevant.

Using the example of climate change, Motl notes that once we have included all interacting factors into the study of climate change, and incorporate every relevant time scale, we must conclude that the temperature is both rising and falling, which is of course "inconvenient" to many political pundits.

But of course, that's just one example. I find this kind of error to be particularly egregious in the social sciences. Historians seem to do it the most, determining for themselves what is "important" and what isn't, and refusing to consider adjacent events or facts.

The next tier Motl discusses is what he terms the "rejection of quantification of claims," but what he really means is the rejection of degrees or nuance.

In other words, once we have moved on from yes/no questions and determined that the answer is "yes," we next have to consider "yes by how much?" or "yes to what degree?" For the simple-minded, yes is enough. But as I have tried to point out on this blog many times, life is often quite complicated, and real-life issues often involve varying degrees of... everything.

Because I believe in objective right-and-wrong, I often get accused of seeing everything in black-and-white. A lot of this is the rejection of mathematical logic, as Motl would put it. It is all the more ironic that such people are often the most guilty of refusing to consider the degree to which something is true or false. In reality, they are the ones who see things in black-and-white; the only difference is that they think everything is a matter of black-and-white opinion, whereas I revel in the fact that a great many things are absolutely true or false, and especially to complicated and varying degrees.

Motl next writes two sections that seem to apply mostly to the realm of quantum physics and climate science. They are good sections, but  I will not discuss them here.

His final point is something that I encounter most often in political discussions. People have an inherent desire to build common ground, and they do so during controversies by watering-down their original statements so much that they come up with statements so vague that they feel the other side must concede "at least that much." They never consider that there is no descriptive power in such statements - they are vagueries designed to end conversation, not to build consensus. Motl puts it this way:

At the beginning, I mentioned that one shouldn't talk about propositions that can't a priori have both answers at all. They're tautologies or anti-tautologies, whatever is the right term for a proposition that can be proved identically false just by using the rules of logic. But surprisingly many people seem to believe that if they leave "enough wiggle room" in their general statements, these statements must be true or, to say the least, they can't be shown to be false.

However, this is a complete misconception. Whether something may be disproved depends on the actual available evidence, not on your vague feelings whether your statement is sufficiently vague or whether your collection of candidate explanations looks like a large army.

Those guilty of this particular strategy are extremely numerous and cannot be dissuaded, mostly because - as Motl notes - they cannot seem to understand why their positions are still wrong, despite their having watered things down to near-disintegration.

Well, Motl's whole post is long and enlightening. Recommended reading for all!
 

My Theory on Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong is again under investigation for (historical) blood-doping, and can't compete in Iron Man triathalons as long as the investigation is underway. Many of his teammates swear Armstrong doped - but they only say so after they themselves have been caught doping. Clearly, the anti-doping committees are harassing Lance. I mean, why pursue someone who has long since retired from professional cycling and only competes in triathalons basically as a hobby and to generate some publicity for his non-profit work? Lance says it's a vendetta, and I agree.

I think Armstrong used to dope. But here's the catch: I don't think Lance Armstrong necessarily understands that he was doping.

Why do I say that? Because EPO is the "doping substance du jour" (for lack of a better term), and it also happens to be an important medication for people going through and recovering from chemotherapy and cancer in general. Both chemotherapy and certain kinds of cancers induce neutropenia, and you can only really keep yourself alive by taking EPO. Armstrong certainly would have had to take EPO to beat his cancer.

I think he took EPO during his recovery and sort of found himself in a situation where he was training and recovering at the same time. Where do you draw the line? When do you say that your EPO is no longer for recovery, that it is now being taken for doping? I think Armstrong probably took EPO longer than he should have, but didn't necessarily see any harm in doing so. (If you disagree with me there, ask yourself how many perfectly normal, non-criminal people you know who keep a couple of spare pain killers around in their medicine cabinets for a rainy day, from the time they had to have that minor surgery.)

I think if he were a tennis player, for example, nobody would care.

But in hindsight, I think he feels there is a real threat that they can take his medals away, and so he has probably done everything he can to avoid being "caught," even though from a totally objective point of view, it would be hard to find fault in a recovering cancer patient's taking EPO.

I don't think the case is cut-and-dry. I don't think a finding of "Armstrong definitely doped" necessarily proves anything about cheating in the Tour du France. I think there is a big difference between a recovering cancer patient who takes EPO, and someone like Floyd Landis, who takes it without medical justification.

But, this is just a theory I have.

The Sub-Continent's Influence Is Spreading

Although they don't explicitly say so, The Color Run - which I discovered this afternoon - shares obvious similarities with Holi, and I would guess come from a similar place. The degree of direct influence will perhaps remain a mystery.

Seriously, Bangladesh?

The Financial Express, a Bangladeshi online newspaper reports that the government of Bangladesh will no longer accept Rohingya refugees fleeing from violence in Burma:

"Our stand is clear; no more Myanmar refugees will be allowed to enter the country at the moment, as we are already hosting tens of thousands of Rohingyas who had entered Bangladesh over the past decades," said earlier a senior official of the ministry of foreign affairs (MoFA).

Some 10 boats with some 500 Rohingyas, including women, children and elderly people, some of whom also injured, were seen floating on the Naf river along Teknaf border town on Tuesday, according to witnesses.

So, over the span of multiple decades, a persecuted minority has fled to Bangladesh, and for that reason, those currently attempting to save their own lives (just ten boatloads of them, containing the equivalent of a third of the number of students at my former high school) are not to be allowed in the country.

I am sensitive to the limited amount of space in the already-over-populated Bangladesh, but to turn away refugees of war is utterly incomprehensible to me. These people aren't seeking anything more than the ability to cross an imaginary line separating them from people who are no more different from them than their own countrymen are.

This seems particularly unconscionable, considering Bangladesh's own history of refugees during the Liberation War and prior (among which we may count economic Nobel laureate Amartya Sen one of the many great world citizens who were there).

I cannot help but wonder, what on Earth are they thinking?

Cochrane on An Overlooked Minarchist Principle

I am a bit slow on the uptake here, mostly because at the time the following blog post was written, I was in between countries....

In a very concise blog post, Chicago School economist John H. Cochrane (not to be confused with Austrian School economist John P. Cochran) highlights a concept vital to the understanding of the minarchic flavor of libertarianism:

We talk about "regulation," but the real issue is rules vs. discretion. Regulating by simple clear rules is much better than regulation by discretion, or by rules so complex they amount to discretion. When a zoning inspector can come in after the fact and always find something wrong, it's in invitation to corruption. We are increasingly a country in which "regulation" means that regulators can tell people what to do on a whim, not one in which clear objective rules are imposed.

I recall from The Road to Serfdom that Hayek referred to this principle as the classical liberalism idea of "Rule of Law," although that term has been used to describe so many different, competing principles that it is probably best to avoid that phrase.

I believe the prevailing philosophy in American politics shifted at some point from a general agreement that rules are to be imposed like surgical incisions, when deemed necessary, to the general idea that regulation qua regulation is simply "necessary."

When you compare the two concepts, it's clear that there is more ambiguity in the latter notion. It is a lazier philosophy. We simply create an overseer and let him do the rest. If the overseer suffers from glut, we oversee the overseer. And so on, and so forth.

All of this vanishes when society adheres to the principle Cochrane describes. If our focus truly is on making rules to prevent specific outcomes (i.e. something more specific than "corporate overreach" or something), then we will govern well.

If, on the other hand, we simple accept the idea that "some regulation is needed," and then we stop thinking about it, then we are in no position to complain when our freedoms disappear and simple things like opening a business become cartoonishly Kafkaesque.

Big Pharma, Government, and Crony Capitalism

Excuse me, I'd just like to direct your attention here.

Problem-Solving and Logical Sequence

In order to solve any difficult problem, we have no choice but to resort to deductive logic. In the realm of philosophy – and especially in the realm of Austrian-flavored economics – there exist some passionate opinions about whether our deductive reasoning is a priori, a posteriori, or based solely on perception. Heck, there are plenty of other theories we could include here, but I’d like to side-step the issue a bit to avoid direct commentary on that particular subject matter. For now, it suffices to note that complex problems cannot truly be solved without deductive logic, regardless of at which point the theory is generated.

As the term deductive implies, this kind of problem-solving requires iterative thinking: First, we do A, then we do B, then comes C, and so on. Consider climbing a ladder. We start on the bottom rung and work upwards, rung-by-rung. It’s possible to skip a few rungs, but only up to a point. What I mean is, we can’t start at the top rung, and then move to the middle rung, then the bottom rung, then the second-to-highest rung, and so on. (That is, we cannot do this for the average ladder. There may be ladders out there that are sufficiently short, or having sufficiently few rungs, or sufficiently spaced rungs to make any rung order available, but we’d be getting far too pedantic if we considered abnormal ladders for the sake of mere metaphor.)

So, solving a problem with deductive reasoning involves a starting point (the ground), an endpoint (the top of the ladder, or the destination reached with the aid of the ladder), and a sequence of middle steps that preclude abnormalities.

What if you wanted to climb from Point A to Point B, so you climbed a ladder, and you ended up at Point C? If that happened, you have committed at least one of the following errors:

·         You had the wrong starting point,

·         The endpoint is not what you thought it was,

·         You used an inappropriately shaped/sized ladder.

Let’s consider each one of these possibilities individually.

Wrong Starting Point

The important thing about this situation is that your problem-solving process was basically correct. The ladder was the correct size, the rungs behaved the appropriate way. From a different starting point, you would have ended up at Point B. You simply started from Point D instead.

In the real world, this might describe a situation in which a basic assumption was incorrect. To use the terminology of logic, your system is valid but false. You accurately predicted the outcome of an alternate scenario. Your only mistake was that the current scenario is not what you thought it was.

Economists tend to be good logicians. They can usually be counted on to come up with a valid logical argument for the economic conditions they anticipate. However, if their starting point is all wrong, they won’t reliably explain the economy. If the “natural rate of unemployment,” for example, is 2.0% rather than 2.5% (or whatever), then this discrepancy may fully account for the economist’s error.

More to the point, if there is no “natural rate of unemployment,” or if it is impossible to know, then no logical series of problem-solving steps starting from a known natural rate of unemployment can ever lead us to greater understanding of the economy itself.

Wrong Endpoint

In this situation, it is also important to note that the ladder-climber’s ladder is exactly correct. The logic is valid, and the starting point is correct. What went wrong? How did you end up at the wrong Point?

One possibility is that the endpoint is not what you thought it was. Seen from the ground, you saw a ledge 15 feet up. You climbed a 15-foot ladder and realized that the ledge was not flat at the top, so there is no destination at which to arrive. Point C is merely a point on the face of a cliff, not the ledge (Point B) at which you expected to arrive.

We often see real-world examples of this. Consider the passionate novice politician who wins the election, only to discover that the system does not behave as anticipated, and he cannot accomplish what he expected to accomplish. Consider the central banker who sets an inflation target of X%, only to discover that X% is the wrong target for the economic conditions.

Another possibility is that we were looking at a ledge at Point C, mistakenly believing it to be a ledge at Point B. This is a case of mistaken identity.

In the real world, this might be a climate scientist who believes that X degrees of global temperature increase will create an irreversible chain-reaction, only to discover that it does not. Or, it might be an economist who believes that a free-market money supply is essentially a barter system, when in fact it is not (sorry Prof. Rowe).

Wrong Ladder

In this situation, the starting point or the endpoint could be correct or incorrect – but most importantly, you are using the wrong ladder.

If you start from Point A, your basic assumptions are correct; it’s your theory that’s all wrong. Note here that it doesn’t really matter if you end up at Point B because your doing so was nothing more than an accident, a mistake. On a different day, you probably wouldn’t have. If you don’t end up at Point B, though, you’ll never get there without using a different ladder, i.e. revising your theory.

This one is actually easier to see in the real world than in the abstract. Sometimes financiers correctly predict market movements, but it’s pure dumb luck, no different than gambling. Other times, they get it wrong and suffer losses. Sometimes economists get it right, sometimes they get it wrong. But they have only ever explained something when they use the right theory, built from the correct assumptions, to describe the conditions we wanted to know about from the very beginning.

Conclusion

If you want to tackle difficult problems, you need more than just a good theory. You need more than just a good “algorithm” that will take you through an iterative, deductive process. You need to start from a correctly identified set of assumptions, and you need to ensure that what you are describing is what you had in mind  in the first place. If these conditions aren’t satisfied, then you haven’t explained anything at all.

Addendum on Yesterday's Post

When I discussed my new exercise plan with my wife yesterday, she reminded me that The Matrix was never intended to be a once-a-day workout. Looks like I had become a little too ambitious.

So instead of what I described yesterday, my plan for this week is to do "The Matrix" workout 3 times this week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The other days will be running-only days, and no change to the described mileage.

I successfully completed the workout yesterday, and it felt really good. My body was a bit shocked by the intensity of the workout - it's been a long time since I've done that much plyometric exercise. It was good for me. A couple of weeks of this sort of thing, and I'll be ready to start increasing intensity and getting creative.

A Small Victory

A big move sure can interrupt the flow of things.

Despite our best intentions, it can be next to impossible to maintain a consistent, challenging routine when there is so much life going on around us. In my case, I started packing and preparing for my move on about May 15^th. From there, my life has been an unyielding state of Go, Go, Go! Obviously, any big move involves some complex logistics and unexpected challenges. Mine has been no different. (I won’t bore you with the gory details, but anyone who has ever made a big move can surely bring you up to speed on the kinds of things that pop up out of nowhere.)

Thankfully, I have arrived at my destination in one piece, without losing any important belongings or damaging any people, places, or things. So there’s that.

The bad news, though, is that I travelled for about a week (including stops along the way), and quickly set up a temporary residence and started working – but have so far been unable to adhere to a consistent and challenging exercise routine. Day by day, I feel a little bit of my strength and endurance slipping away as I lose out on my work-out time in order to battle with rush hour traffic and the ongoing commitments required to establish a more permanent place of residence. When I finally manage to scrape together some spare time, I am unsurprisingly inclined to spend it sleeping, reading, resting, or eating… basically, all those things I wish I were doing while I am rushing to do all the work I have to do.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because I have a sneaky suspicion that I’m not the only person in the world who has ever felt like this before. I imagine some of my faithful readers have often felt this way from time to time. But this is more than just a collective pity party or pessimistic rant.

The Good News

Let me cover a few things that I managed to do right over the course of the past month.

First, I was wise enough to pack my workout gear and a set of resistance bands in an easily accessible bag, and I have been able to run, even if sporadically. More importantly, I have been extremely good at maintaining a daily strength training regimen. While it’s nothing intensive or challenging, it has been enough to keep my body in decent shape and my blood sugar in good control. Here’s the breakdown:

A-Day: Repeat the following four times, with 60 seconds rest between each set

·         40 push-ups (That’s right – I actually increased my number of repetitions)

·         30 bicep curls (with resistance bands)

·         20 flies/lateral raises (with resistance bands)

B-Day: Repeat the following four times, with 60 seconds rest between each set

·         A “Crunch-Thing”

o   50 crunches for the first set

o   40-second right-side plank for the second set

o   40-second left-side plank for the third set

o   50 combined leg-raises/hip-raises for the fourth set

·         30 unweighted squats

·         30 calf-raises

Astute Stationary Waves readers should draw parallels between this daily morning routine and a couple of previous workouts I have written about (most notably “The Matrix” and my evolving A-Day/B-Day routines). This has been a fairly good routine because it’s not quite as challenging as The Matrix, and yet it has been far more challenging than, say, my Winter training regimen. At least in that sense, it has been somewhat of a “best of both worlds” scenario.

Second, as I mentioned above, I have managed to keep my blood sugar under good control. This has been thanks to a few important things: (1) Consistent adherence to daily scheduled mealtimes and bedtime; (2) Basically eliminating rice from my diet altogether; (3) Voluntary and in some cases involuntary portion control during meals; (4) Increasing my long-acting insulin dose; (5) Keeping a close watch on my insulin to ensure that it doesn’t spoil. To that last point, I actually invested in a refrigerated car cooler for the long drive, which I have managed to also leverage during day trips to hot locations. All things considered, while my blood sugar has been a little high over the past month, it hasn’t been nearly as high as is typical for me during disruptions in my routine, and keeping good BG control means I have been able to stay healthy despite my lack of exercise.

Third, and most esoterically, I have been talking about diet, exercise, and diabetes a lot lately. This might seem silly, but I believe that simply keeping my health as a “top-of-mind” issue during the course of a hectic month has done a good job of keeping me mentally on track. And, of course, if you buy into the Stationary Waves philosophy of health and fitness, you already know that the mental game is the most important component in all of this.

When I add it all up, what I’m left with is a bit of a small victory for myself. Considering the situation, I could easily have spun out of control and become very unhealthy. But I managed to keep my head in the game, get some good daily exercise, and keep my blood sugar in a controllable range. That’s worth celebrating.

And Then, As Usual, He Took It Too Far…

Hilariously emblematic of my approach to all things, now that I have experienced some good success, I am hungry for more. I am not yet fully established in my new home, but I have enough of a temporary routine going for myself that today I have embarked on a new fitness regimen.

The hot weather in my new home is a little excessive during the summer – too much for me to be able to engage in any serious marathon training. Thus, I’m sticking to some modest mileage and focusing a bit more on my strength training, especially upper-body training and plyometrics. Moreover, to my chagrin, I have little other choice but to run in the morning rather than the afternoon. In the case, the heat is a bit of a culprit, but the main culprit is the evening after-work traffic. It’s simply too heavy for me to get home in time to run and eat safely, without risking an overnight low.

In a few weeks, I’ll have established regular gym access and a few good running routes. Until then, my “Week 1” shall be as follows:

Monday:

·         Morning:

o   4-mile easy run

·         Evening:

o   The Matrix – That’s right, folks. It’s back, and badder than ever.

Tuesday:

·         Morning:

o   5-mile run

·         Evening:

o   The Matrix

Wednesday:

·         Morning:

o   5-mile run

·         Evening:

o   The Matrix

Thursday:

·         Morning:

o   5-mile fartlek run

·         Evening:

o   The Matrix

Friday:

·         Morning:

o   4-mile easy run

·         Evening:

o   The Matrix

Saturday:

·         7-8 mile trail run

I’ll start with that for the next week or two, then start building toward a bit more mileage, and an alternating strength training / plyometrics A-Day/B-Day regimen. It’s the only way to beat the heat.

Movie Review: Prometheus

Last night, I had the pleasure of watching Ridley Scott's newest movie, Prometheus.

I had some trepidation going in. Most of what I had read in terms of movie reviews was predominantly negative. For example, the website where I check movie times (Cinemaclock.com) had a viewer rating of 6.0/10.0; Rotten Tomatoes has it assessed at 74%. Many of the various reviews I had read on the internet had shared a unanimous assessment of the movie: visually impressive, but ultimately disappointing.

I couldn't disagree more. I loved this movie. It was everything I hoped it would be.

Perhaps the disconnect here is rooted in the fact that different people are drawn to the various Alien movies for different reasons. The original film, Alien, is an unquestionable piece of classic cinema, one of the great movies hailed as iconic of both science fiction and horror film-making, and often touted as a feminist triumph, thanks to Sigourney Weaver's brilliant performances. But there is much to that movie. Not only did it give birth to the modern "science-fiction/horror" genre, it also created a visual template for what aliens might look like and how they might behave. (This impact can be seen in dozens of copycat movies and video games, perhaps most obviously in the "Contra" video game series, but also in games such as the "Metroid" series, and innumerable low-budget alien films.) Alien cut the mold. It had such wide appeal that it must surely mean millions of different things to the millions of people who love that movie.

Any sequel to a movie of such far-reaching significance is sure to disappoint anyone who doesn't share the same vision of the original movie as the film-makers themselves. Aliens, the first sequel, disappointed many. Alien 3 disappointed many more. Alien: Resurrection disappointed even more people. Nevertheless, the films have a strong following, a bit too sizable to be considered "cult." These movies never disappoint when it comes to the bread-and-butter of a great Alien movie: Plenty of gore, suspense, violence, doom, special effects, and brilliant performances by actors who haven't quite broken into blockbuster movies just yet.

The film franchise has always been a bit light on back-story and plot intricacies. The franchise has always left a great deal of loose ends hanging. Where many critics pan the Alien film franchise in this department, I consider it one of the major strengths. Great horror films remain mysterious, right to the end. Great franchises leave you with a desire to see more. Leave the mythos-building to the comic-con junkies; the rest of us don't want these kinds of movies to expand into an extensive Marvel Universe. We want gross and terrifying aliens, and lots of them. We want death and destruction.

Put another way, the reason I personally love the Alien franchise is not for its complex story-telling, but rather for its aesthetic. These are dark, gloomy movies in which the aliens always win, but for a strong and solitary character whose emotional desire to survive is too strong to be defeated by a greasy monster.

Prometheus delivers on all accounts.

True, as a prequel to the franchise, one goes into the movie expecting answers, back-story, and mythology. To provide these things would be satisfying indeed for the comic-con crowd. But it would also be a major violation of the Alien aesthetic. Instead, Scott stays true to his artistic creation, brilliantly crafting the same sort of cinematic landscape the other movies has. Like the others, it starts out hopeful and soon becomes dreadful. Like the others, there are no real winners.

But the movie also adds some great new elements, namely new aliens. Unlike some of the previous films in the franchise, there is also an additional level of conflict in the story: It's no longer (wo)man vs. beast, it is now also (wo)man vs. man, (wo)man vs. self, and (wo)man vs. beast.

The icing on the cake here are the great performances by Michael Fassbender and Guy Pearce. Fassbender is clearly a rising star, and he delivers a character that simply steals the show. Pearce has long been a favorite actor of mine, and his performance is simply jaw-dropping. Many people less familiar with his work may not even recognize him. He plays his character so differently than his characters have been in the past that he steals every scene in which he plays.

He also delivers what is perhaps the greatest moment in the movie: "There is nothing," to which Fassbender's "David" character delivers and equally show-stopping reply.

For fans of the Alien franchise, it is tough to see where this movie goes wrong. I give it full marks on all accounts. Highly recommended!

You Can't Always Get What You Want

Why do people have such ridiculous reactions to desires like food, etc.? It seemingly can't just be that pizza is delicious and people like to eat delicious things. It has to be that pizza is impossible to say no to, so therefore you have to keep it away from you at all costs! It's bizarre.

When people eat sweets in front of me, they often act like they feel sorry for me because I "have to sit there and watch" them eat sweets without being able to eat them myself. I honestly don't understand why people think like this. I don't care if they eat sweets, and I would love to have some sweets myself, but I'm not tortured by it. It's just sweets.

I don't care. I would also like to buy a brand new Jaguar convertible and drive it from the tip of Alaska all the way down to the tip of Argentina. I would like to sell three certified platinum albums and tour the world a few times. I'd like to invent a cure for cancer and write a world famous economic treatise. I'd like to travel throughout outer space.

There are hundreds of things I want, but cannot have. On that list, food ranks pretty low. 

But more importantly, I am comfortable with the fact that I might not ever be able to have some of the most coveted items on that list. Why on earth would it torture me that I cannot have some things that I really, really want? Are people that uncomfortable with things they can't have?  Are we all four-year-olds?

Book Review: A History of Bangladesh

Just prior to leaving Ottawa, I picked up three new books from Chapters, one of which being A History of Bangladesh, by Willem van Schendel. The book is written with pleasant, very approachable prose uncharacteristic of most non-fiction books. Therefore, not surprisingly, I finished it quickly. It was an excellent book.

Van Schendel's Bangladesh

One of the most important aspects of this book was the degree to which the author's own views were inserted at every corner. Ordinarily, I would count such editorializing against the book, but in this case, van Schendel has come to some of the same conclusions about the country of Bangladesh that I have myself. Nonetheless, I had a great deal to learn about the Bengali delta, its people, and its culture, and van Schendel's book provides a fascinating look into the little-understood early history of the region.

According to van Schendel, ancient Bengal ("ancient" is my word, not the author's - we're talking about the period corresponding to the ancient Greek and Roman empires) was an important hub of economic activity. Its people produced an enormous and highly valued agricultural output, including cash crops before such things were understood as "cash crops," and also legendary textiles. 

More importantly, however, the Bengali delta was a crossroads of trade, providing a bridge between the European, Persian, and Indian kingdoms of the West and the Far East kingdoms of the East. Situated right on the coast, immediately between the two most active trade regions of the globe at that time, the Bengali people may have been the world's original "merchant class," or at least such is the picture painted by van Schendel.

What fascinates me most about this picture is that it seems to lend a window into the modern history of the people of Bangladesh. Like all regions of the world, the merchant class is always scoffed-at and hated by would-be rulers. Van Schendel indicates that even the earliest written descriptions of Bangladesh are highly critical and dismissive of its culture. My explanation is that emperors did as they do now: denigrate anyone they wish to own.

And own Bangladesh they did. The Mughals, the Indians, the Dutch, the French, and the British... Empires the world over tried to harness the raw creative economic power of Bangladesh - tried and failed. The second component of van Schendel's picture of Bangladesh is his account of how every major empire throughout history has done its best to keep the people of Bangladesh under a boot heel while they, the would-be emperors, attempt to reap the riches of the region.

This unfortunate historical fact is, according to van Schendel, the main reason why Bangladeshi poverty persists to this day. It is a country that was prevented from developing its agricultural technology by the reigning British who merely wished to produce large cash crops using cheap labor-intensive farming methods. It is a country that was prevented from developing its industrial technology by the Pakistani government's pursuit of foreign aid for "traditional" output.

Again and again, van Schendel's Bangladesh has endured colonialism and political in-fighting among competing ruling minorities, to the detriment of the Bangladeshi people at large. But it is not all bad news. Perhaps the most important lesson van Schendel provides us with is the fact that, despite the worst kind of political catastrophes, the heart and soul of the Bangladeshi people remains true to itself, resilient and unconquerable.