I use a Garmin 800 GPS device to log my cycling activity. including my commutes. Since I have now built up nearly 4 years of cycling the same route, I had a good dataset to look at how accurate the device is. I wrote some code to import all of the rides tagged with commute in rubiTrack 4 Pro (technical details are below). These tracks needed categorising so that they could be compared.
Towards the end of 2015, I started distance running. I thought it’d be fun to look at the frequency of my runs over the course of 2016. Most of my runs were recorded with a GPS watch. I log my cycling data using Rubitrack, so I just added my running data to this. This software is great but to do any serious number crunching, other software is needed.
Google Scholar is useful, but its inclusiveness and mix of automatically updated and hand-curated profiles means you should never take any of its numbers at face value. Case in point: the power couple Prof.
Top Trumps is a card game for children. The mind can wander when playing such games with kids… typically, I start thinking: what is the best strategy for this game? But also, as the game drags on: what is the quickest way to lose? Since Top Trumps is based on numerical values with simple outcomes, it seemed straightforward to analyse the cards and to simulate different scenarios to look at these questions.
2016 was the 400 year anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. Stratford-upon-Avon Rotary Club held the Shakespeare Marathon on the same weekend. Runners had an option of half or full marathon. There were apparently 3.5 K runners. Only 700 of whom were doing the full marathon. The chip results were uploaded last night and can be found here. Similar to my post on the Coventry Half Marathon, I thought I’d quickly analyse the data.
Well, the 2015/2016 season was one to forget for Crewe Alexandra. Relegation to League Two (English football’s 4th tier) was confirmed on 9th April with a 3-0 defeat to local rivals Port Vale. Painful. Maybe Repeat Failure is a bit strong. Under Dario Gradi, the Railwaymen eventually broke into League One/Championship (the 2nd Tier) where they punched above their weight for 8 seasons.
Fans of probability love random processes. And lotteries are a great example of random number generation. The UK National Lottery ran in one format from 19/11/1994 until 7/10/2015. I was talking to somebody who had played the same set of numbers in all of these lottery draws and I wondered what the net gain or loss has been for them over this period.
Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty Ben Ratliff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) A non-science book review for today’s post. This is a great read on “how to listen to music”. There have been hundreds of books published along these lines, the innovation here however is that we now live in an age of musical plenty.
The end of the month sees the Coventry Half Marathon. I looked at what constitutes a good time over this course, based on 2015 results. I thought I’d post this here in case any one is interested. The breakdown of runners by category for the 2015 event. Male Senior (MSEN) category has the most runners, constituting a wide age grouping. There were 3565 runners in total, 5 in an undetermined category and 9 DNFs.
University of Warwick is a popular conference destination, with thousands of visitors per year. Next time you visit and stay on campus, why not bring your running shoes and try out these routes? Route 1 This is just over 10K and it takes you from main campus out towards Cryfield Pavilion. A path goes to the Greenway (a former railway), which is a nice flat gravel track.