probably the most bestest website ever

With talk of starting up a triathlon club in London, I've put together a little website to help the process along. http://geocities.com/blacktoesociety/

I'm an aunt

Hannah Eleanor Sweny, Born on Friday December 12th.

fishes

One of my favourite things to do when I visit my brother and sister-in-law is to go to Big Al's fish store. The highlight is the enormous 3700 gallon tank which houses a couple of small sharks. Also this wall full of beta fish looks pretty cool, although I feel a bit sorry for them all holed up in those tiny fish bowls. The sharks too must get a little bored swimming around the same 5 x 1 m rectangle all the time. Not at all like swimming around a 25 x 1.5 m rectangle all the time. Nope.

too much babies talk make andrea something something

As my sister-in-law is due to give birth any day now, much of our talk centers around pregnancy/birthing/babies - related topics. I've heard the words "dilation" and "contraction" approximately infinity times each this weekend; I'm now fairly well-versed in the various ways in which one can induce labour; and I've learned more than I'd have to say is strictly necessary about evening primrose suppositories and ovulation charts.

Anyway, my mom came over for tea and snacks last night and Justyna was questioning her about her pregnancies. Having given birth to four larger-than-average babies, she is probably a reliable authority on the matter. Now, over the course of the last couple of years I've been exposed to increasingly explicit suggestions that I was an unwanted baby. Up until yesterday it was mostly comments mentioning how I was "unexpected" or "a surprise". But last night my mom gave me a more elaborate explanation for the first time. At the outset of their marriage she anticipated having two kids, but I guess after seeing how spectacularly great Ryan and Jen were, they decided to have another. After Loren was born she got an IUD, the effectiveness of which apparently failed after 15 months. She discovered she was pregnant at 8 weeks, at which point the doctor had to remove the IUD and told her that in doing so it might abort the baby. She said that even though she didn't really want to have another kid, she was a bit sad about that. Fortunately for all of us nothing bad happened and I was a healthy little 9 pounds + baby. (Although apparently I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. If I had been born at a hospital instead of at home my mother would have had to get a c-section. )

After that Justyna asked my mom which of the four of us was the easiest baby to take care of. "Oh, I'd have to say Andrea was, because when she was born I already had three young children to look after, so I didn't end up giving as much attention to her as I did to the other ones." Mmm, what a heartwarming sentiment.

People are silly

I've been reading a lot of papers in the domain of "happiness economics", which is mostly concerned with the so-called happiness paradox: while all measures of wealth, income and standard of living have increased considerably over the past 50 years, we haven't seen any increases in people's self-reported happiness. Economics has given this problem a bit more attention in recent years, but probably not as much as it deserves. After all, we're supposed to be concerned with the allocation of scarce resources in the best possible manner, i.e. to maximize people's utility or happiness. If the link between income and happiness is so tenuous, the optimal allocation of resources doesn't seem very important. And if economic growth and prosperity don't make people any happier, then there goes a large portion of the profession that can be dismissed as "mostly useless".

After reading approximately a million of these papers you start to see a pattern. This is pretty much how they go:

FACT 1: People aren't any happier now, with all their cell phones and interwebs and enormous houses and whatnot, than they were 50 years ago, or whenever the subjective well-being survey was first administered.

Most of the empirical studies try to measure what they refer to as "subjective well-being", which is pretty much just how happy you think you are. It's proxied by questions like "Would you say that you are generally very happy with your life, happy, neither happy nor unhappy, unhappy with your life, or very unhappy." The responses are aggregated, and the happiness of the population is measured by the proportion of people who answer in each of the categories. And all the within-country, across-time studies find that these proportions remain constant.

FACT 2: Income only really matters at levels of subsistence or extreme poverty.

What they do find is that for countries where average income is less than $12 000 a year, economic growth in the form of higher income over time does lead to higher levels of reported happiness. This is generally unsurprising.

FACT 3: Within-country variation in income is correlated with happiness.

That is, the rich people in the country are happier than the poor people. Also unsurprising.

Traditional economics doesn't like facts 1 and 3 taken together, because they seem to contradict one another. If rich people are happier in the population, then making people wealthier over time should make them happier. Enter happiness economics, which introduces the notion of a positional good. The papers that talk about positional goods usually cite surveys that ask people some variation on these questions:

1. Choose between world A in which you have $50,000 in real purchasing power, while everyone else has $25,000, or world B in which you have $100,000 and everyone else has $200,000.

2. Choose between world C in which you have 2 weeks vacation time and everyone else has 1 week, or world D in which you have 4 weeks vacation and everyone else has 8.

Approximately half of people will prefer world A to world B, while about 80% choose D over C. One of the first economics books I read used this example, and I was a little bit taken aback about the responses to question 1. I suppose it's understandable how some people might value being high up in the income distribution so much as to forego half of their salary, but more than 50%? I found that a little unsettling. When you think about it, going from world A to world B is like saying "How would you like it if I doubled your income and quadrupled the income of everyone else?". I'm pretty sure I would take this offer without hesitation. Fortunately the same result doesn't occur with the second question, because leisure is a less conspicuous form of consumption. Most people can't easily demonstrate to their neighbours how much vacation time they have, and it's less susceptible to envy. This is pretty much the opposite of how I feel about things, having chosen the low-consumption, high-leisure trade-off of grad school.

Economics doesn't like this because it's too context-dependent. In almost every economic model, individuals only care about their consumption bundle. $100,000 consumed in a world where everyone is poorer than you should be just as good as $100,000 in world where everyone is richer. But with positional goods, your position in the distribution matters (to some extent) more than the absolute value of the good. What's bad about this is that it can lead to arms races, in which everyone is trying to move up the distribution and ultimately no one is better off. Papers often quote the anecdote of the job candidate with a really expensive suit that leaves a favourable impression on the employer. This prompts every candidate to purchase expensive suits, destroying the benefit it conferred in the first place (as a form of distinction). I think this is the way a lot of sports environments work too. A new swimsuit comes out which is supposed to be super fast, but if all your competitors have it too, you're not really that much better off.


One of the papers asked a bunch of these hypothetical questions. The numbers here represent the percentage of people (sample size 146) who would accept worse values of these things in absolute terms if it meant having a better value than everyone else. I can understand the attractiveness measures being high on this list, but the ranking of "Child's intelligence" is a little disturbing to me. Not that I'd want my kids to be dumber than everyone else, but if I had to pick between having stupid kids in a community of morons or having somewhat intelligent offspring among a group of brilliant children, I would have to opt for the latter. The "Papers to write" is also a little baffling. Who are these 43.8 people who would rather write a greater number of papers if it means their colleagues are writing more than them? And finally I have to take issue with the "Own education" outcome. Depending on the degree and subject, education is the quintessential worthless signaling tool. For most people the only value that a university education provides them is as a signal to employers that they are reasonably intelligent people. Beyond the more or less practical disciplines like engineering, nursing, etc. or for those who want to go on and teach, how many people actually make use of the things they learned in school? Seriously, think of all those english and history degrees whose sole reason for existence was to label someone as "university educated". Maybe I'm biased by my belief that university is mostly a sham, but I think "Own education" should top that list. It makes no sense not to prefer a world where my B.Sc. makes me the most educated person, to a world in which I have my Ph.D. and an assortment of postdocs under my belt, but so does everyone else. People are silly.

ah, monotony

Today I was reminded of how much I enjoy doing monotonous things. My morning was spent rearranging the kitchen (which consisted of little more than shuffling pots and bags of rice) and cleaning the office. These tasks were slightly sidetracked, however, when I discovered a giant tub of change amidst the clutter, and promptly took to sorting out the pennies from the higher denominations. I spent a good half hour at this task before I noticed how much time had passed and that I had little time to get ready before I had to leave the house. Rest assured that tub will provide countless hours of entertainment for me.

When I was little I used to sit in the sand for long periods of time with a magnet gathering iron filings. And during undergrad I produced a number of insanely intricate pattern illustrations for which I would sit for hours upon end drawing. I still get carried away walking on stoney beaches looking for cool rocks, or on sandy beaches looking for shells. I think this affinity for monotonous exercises carried over to swimming, where I could swim for hours upon hours and not get bored.

I think if I carried a giant tub of choins with me all the time I would never become impatient or bored, never be bothered by waiting for someone or something. But somehow I think that sorting through change during a seminar or class might be frowned upon. For those I'll have to stick to doodling and thinking about unicorns.

the dye is cast

I'm all registered for florida 2009, so unless I decide to charitably donate $400 to North American Sports, it looks like I'm doing an ironman in approximately twelve months. It's a little amusing to me, because on precisely July 1st I can distinctly remember posssessing the notion that going all the way to florida to do a race was a little absurd, and that it would be a very long time before I had either the ability or the inclination to do an ironman. It was while biking back from Embro after a 10k race with a handful of runner's choice peoples, with Alli telling me about how great it was and how everyone should do one and that there was a sizeable group of Londoners who all went down. It all seemed very far removed from me at the time, but within the better part of a couple of months I became friends with a lot of the people she was referring to, including the one who would soon become the big A to my little a.

To illustrate the serendipitous nature of my decision to sign up, here is the series of events which culminated in my $551 expenditure:

1. Moving to London. This in itself was slightly random and unplanned. In the fall of my final year at Queen's I received an email from the graduate director here portraying it as an appealing choice for math majors. I immediately dismissed it as something I would never in all my lifetime consider doing, leaving it to gather dust in my inbox. A few months later when said inbox was reaching critical mass I came upon it again. Being less than four months away from graduation and the looming dread of facing some sort of strange, foreign world outside of academia, I gave it a read-through and concluded that it wouldn't hurt to check it out. I few email correspondences and a bit of internet research later I was impressed enough to go for the 8-month masters, with the possibility of jumping into the second year of the PhD if I liked it.
   
2. Joining a cycling group. My sister Jen has been cycling and triathloning for a few years, and truthfully it had already snuck it's way into the small corner of my mind labelled "things I might like to do at some point in my life." Browsing about the interwebs one day I happened upon the Champion Bicycles web page, where they advertised their training group. Immediately I felt compelled to get a road bike, and sure enough within a couple of weeks I found a used one for a decent price that fit me well enough. After spending a small fortune on cycling gear and various cycling accoutrements, I was a little nervous about my first ride. If I didn't like it then that would be a lot of money that could have otherwise been spent on cheese and trips to the zoo. Fortunately, I was immediately in love with road biking. And with Champion being a triathlon-oriented cycling group, it wasn't long until I was doing brick workouts and happily signing up for the Lakeside triathlon.
3. Joining a running group. The first time I went to the store I bought a pair of shoes, and was informed about the marathon training group. In typical andrea fashion I immediately rejected this as "not my kind of thing". But after doing some running with Champion and a 10k on my own, I changed my mind and signed up. I missed a lot of the initial workouts because of traveling and other things, and, since I made no effort to get to know anyone, after the first month I had talked to approximately three people.
   
4. Going to the chiropractor. I have this weird rib pain thing that bothers me when I run, and after it forced me to walk a stretch in my first triathlon (as well as be in lots o' pain during the non-walking portions) I decided to try and get it taken care of. So I went to a sports chiropractor. On one of my visits a lady from the running group was there and she recognized me. We started talking and she mentioned that a group of people were biking to Embro to do the 10k on Canada Day. Of course I jumped at the opportunity to bike, and was always trying to find more people to bike with. So I emailed the appropriate people and met them on Tuesday for some biking and running. That's when I met Alli and company, made some new friends, and subsequently felt inclined to make more friends, show up at the runt club and go out for breakfast on sundays. That was the beginning of my inculcation into the world of ironman.
   
5. The runt club one friday night. Hung out with a pretty okay group of people, drank a lot, spoke very little, but acquired a ride to Camp Hayes the following morning. That was the turning point, because from then on most of my free time was spent around people involved in that kind of thing. And gradually it became an increasingly reasonable thing to do, until finally it seemed like the right thing to do. Hopefully it will still be the right thing to do 12 months from now.
   

And that's it. I went down to Florida and signed up. 7 months after first purchasing a road bike I'm in the market for a tri bike. 6 months after doing my first 10k and thinking it was long, I've done a marathon and can't wait to do more. I'm excited about speedsuits and tri shorts and 6-hour bike rides and swimming seriously again. In my estimation these are all very good things, and I think I'm going to have a thoroughly enjoyable twelve months.

triathlon permutations

So, I was musing to myself about the potential ironman today, trying to compare it to the 40km swim I did way back when I was all into swimming in that kind of crazy way. And it got me to thinking about how 40km is pretty much a marathon, so I’ve pretty much swum the run portion of the ironman. Not after biking 180km mind you, but still… (trail off)

This brought me to the idea that it would be really cool to do different permutations of triathlons. Being a swimmer and a not-yet-good runner, I sometimes experience a little pang of indignancy at the relatively minor role bestowed upon swimming by triathlons. It would be fun to do a triathlon where the longest portion was the swim, maybe a nice little 15k or something. You wouldn’t necessarily need to change the order of the events, just their relative time duration.

Three sections means 6 possible permutations:

1. swim bike run - the traditional triathlon
2. swim run bike - longer run and shorter bike? I think we’ve taken a step backwards…
3. bike swim run - Mmm… the long swim sounds right, but the short bike doesn’t do justive to the wonderfulness that is cycling.
4. bike run swim - No one likes over 5 hours of running.
5. run swim bike - Now we’re getting somewhere. No need to make the run any longer than it has to be.
6. run bike swim - Yep, this is it. Perrrfect.

marathon

I did my first marathon yesterday. It was painful from start to finish due to a couple of injuries, but it was still a very enjoyable experience. That may be in part owing to the fact that I went at a more or less leisurely pace on account of said injuries.

What I’ve noticed (and what pleases me) after re-entering the world of competitive sport and serious training is the way my brain immediately grasps at the slightest hint of a challenge and deposits it into a kind of immutable to-do list. It’s this weird little urge that fights against the part of me that generates wise and reasonable notions. The challenges I’d make for myself in swimming - small ones like doing a bunch of 50’s without breathing, or big ones like swimming 200×200 - each started as a small spark of a feeling that this would be something really cool to do, and quickly cemented into a very difficult to defy commitment to do them. I’ve been lacking in such feelings ever since swimming faded from its once-prominent position in my life, so it’s been fun to encounter some new ones. I guess it started with my first long runs earlier in the summer, where I rotcheted up my longest-distance-yet-run by 30-40%. And the ~340 km biking plus race weekend, made slightly unpleasant by a cold. And then the marathon in which, after convincing myself that I wouldn’t run the full distance if I was in a lot of pain, I decided after the first 2.5 miles that I would run the full distance in a lot of pain.

That propensity to readily jump at the chance to do crazy things is a quality of my brain that I’m particularly fond of, so I’m glad to see it hasn’t atrophied in the few years that I’ve starved it of challenges. I’ll bet it will come in handy with the impending ironman training too.

In other news, there was a guy who did the marathon on stilts, and I thought that was really impressive.

undergrads

I was walking on campus the other day, and I passed a couple of blonde, tights-and-dress-like-shirts clad girls walking in the opposite direction, holding their notebooks over their heads to protect them from the rain. Now, I’m pretty sure hair doesn’t become irreparably damaged by rain, and I’m also fairly certain that paper does. In fact, I believe it is common practice in this culture to douse one’s head with water periodically for cleansing purposes. It seems like common sense would dictate that one would not cover the thing that is impervious to water with the thing that can be damaged by water. But then again I don’t wear makeup to school and spend a lot of time on my hair every morning. Only six days a week.