Race Report, Naperville Turkey Trot; November 25, 2010

Naperville Lion's Club Turkey Trot, November 25, 2010: 08:00

Conditions: Low clouds and mist, 38F (3C)

There were 6131 people who completed the Turkey Trot, with a best time of 14:54 and the slowest time of 1:06:12. The complete results can be found here.

With so many people, the start was quite slow. They asked the runners to self-sort themselves into groups based on their expected pace, from 6:00/mi to 12:00/mi in 1:00 steps. This stretched out for about 3oo yards down the road! I decided to take a spot about 200 yards from the starting line, just behind the group at the 10:00/mi placard. My goal was to get close to 12:00/mi for the entire race--a very aggressive goal!

The gun sounded at 8:00 sharp, and we all tried to move forward, to no avail. Slowly, slowly we sauntered to the starting line. Oh, so slowly! It took me approximately 8 minutes to reach the starting line!

My initial pace was just over 10:00/mile, as I expected it would be (adrinaline and all that). This quickly came down to a more sustainable 11:30/mile. There was a lot of weaving--it seems that 10% of the folks decided to run for long enough to be able to say that they "ran the Turkey Trot," and then walk, side by side with 5 of their closest friends and talk about life, the universe and everything. These barriers kept appearing over and over again--it was very frustrating for me.

I had my Garmin GPS/HRM set to auto-lap at 0.5 mile increments so I could keep track of my average pace in a meaningful way. I was able to maintain the sub-12:00/mi pace for the first 1.5 miles!

For some reason, my legs felt very heavy this morning. I tried not to think about it too much.

On Marty's advice, I also tried not to think about my heart rate, but rather focus on my pace (only). I was keenly aware of my heart pumping, but it never seemed to be stressing out. So I perserveered!

Aurora Special Olympics Run for the Athletes 5K, Saturday November 6, 2010

I completed this race in good condition! Final time: 39:50 (according to the timing) or 39:41 (according to my Garmin Forerunner).

Best part: I won first prize in the raffle!

Here are the data from the Forerunner, first the heart rate and pace:

And the summary information:

I ran for 60 minutes this morning on this route (including 2 minutes of wal at the outset and 4 minutes at the end). West Aurora High School is at the upper edge, left of center, of this image.

First Friday?

I have a question.

If one were to count backwards in seven day increments from today, how many increments would it take to find a day that was not called "Friday?"

I have done a little reading on the Wikipedia, Week, and see that there were interruptions in the sequence of continuous weeks (officially, at least) in France between 1973 and 1801 (they tried a 10-day week (oy! the French are so silly sometimes!), in the Soviet Union (they tried 5 and 6 day weeks from 1929-1940), and China and Japan (which have a specific time that they adopted the 7-day week, around 1000 AD).

This article indicates that the Jews had the 7-day week no later than the 6th centurty BC.

I'm curious.

Comparing Canon Cameras: SD200, XSi/450D and 7D

In my family, we own three Canon camera at this moment, the ancient but incredible SD200 (3.2 MegaPixels, point-&-shoot), the Canon XSi (450D in Europe; 12.1 MP Digital SLR) and my recently-acquired 7d (18.1 MP DSLR).

There are gazillions of side-by-side comparisons of digital cameras on the "Internets", so my contribution is not going to be profound. But it is interesting to me because I feel that our SD200 is WAY better than it should be, and my XSi is worse than it should be.

So here is the first A-B-C comparison. This morning (at 8:30 AM CDT), I took a shady picture of the deck in our back yard with each camera set to automatic, flash off, on a tripod. Here is the un-processed result from, first, the SD200:

(Click on the image to see the full res version.)

Now the XSi.

(For the XSi and the 7D, I used the exact same lens: The Canon EF 50mm f1.8.)

The automatic image from teh 7D is 9.2 MB, and this blog has a limit of 8 MB per image, so I resized it from 5184x3456 to the same size as the XSi image, 4272x2848. Here it is:

For the final stage of this little test, I ran the "I'm feeling lucky" process from Picasa on each image, and then exported them to 1600 pixels. SD200:

The XSi processed image:

And the 7D processed image:

Conclusions for this subject: The SD200 has significant "bluing" around the edges. There is not a lot of difference between the XSi and the 7d, but there may be a small improvement in the sharpness from the 7D: look at the grass blades in front of the step.

More later

Photos from Japan's J-PARC Accelerator Complex

I took a bunch of pictures during the tour of the J-PARC facility in central Japan, north of Tokyo, on the Pacific coast. You can see the pix at my Picasa site:

J-PARC, LINAC10, September 17, 2010

Misinformation about CERN and the LHC

For sure, CERN's LHC is making great progress. But they have not overtaken Fermilab's Tevatron in the amount of "physics" that has been delivered so far.

So it burns my butt when reporters get this fact wrong! In this article from Yahoo!, the author says this:

After a shaky start, experiments at the LHC have in a few months replicated discoveries that took decades to complete at the rival Tevatron accelerator in the United States.

The true fact is that the plan for the LHC is to run through 2011 so that, by that time, they will have replicated the data that the Tevatron has taken decades to produce.

They have not replicated the Tevatron data!

Yet.

As of now, the experiments at the LHC have accumulated approximately one-twenty-thousandths (0.00005 or 0.05%) of the Tevatron data.

(Because the LHC operates at a higher energy than the Tevatron (3.5 TeV compared to 0.98 TeV), the "effectiveness" of these data is improved by between 2 and 5 times.)

And to say that they "replicated the discoveries" is also misleading: The Tevatron discoveries show them precisely where to look! Anyway, these discoveries at the Tevatron were made with equivalent amount of data, several decades ago.

This sort of mistake unnecessarily makes the Tevatron and Fermilab seem meaningless in the context of CERN and the LHC. This is just not true (and it is not fair). The point of this article, that CERN is bracing for budget cuts, makes Fermilab even more relevant, especially if we decide to extend the Tevatron run through 2012 (which, IHMO, we should).