The Kipsang Number

In this discussion between Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Thompson about the World Track and Field Championships, Gladwell brought up a concept called the Kipsang Number.

I watched the marathon and was struck (as I always am watching marathons) by the same dumb, obvious point: they are fast. It’s worth dwelling on this a moment. Back when Wilson Kipsang set the world record (which was then promptly broken), my running friends and I came up with the “Kipsang number,” which represented how long could you keep up with Wilson Kipsang while he was running twenty-six miles. I am a devoted runner and my Kipsang number is less than a mile. If I’m lucky, fourteen-hundred metres. You are a really good runner, and I’m guessing your Kipsang number is two miles. The average, healthy, athletic, American, twenty-two-year old varsity athlete in a sport other than track probably has a Kipsang number of between 400 and 800 metres. To recap: you could keep up with him for a quarter of a mile, then you would collapse in exhaustion. He would keep running at the same pace for another twenty-six miles.
 

My cycling friends and I often ponder a similar number when out on group rides: on a flat road, how long can you bike at the speed that professional cyclists ride at in the flats in the peloton? Or how long can you hold the average speed of a professional climbing expert like Nairo Quintana on a cycling climb?

This would be a fun charity event, either on the track or in cycling, to invite average Joes to try to keep up with Kipsang or a strong pro cyclist like Fabio Aru for as long as possible, and soon as you fell behind, you'd be eliminated. Since that is logistically too complex to set up for all but a few people, perhaps fitness apps like Strava can add in virtual challenges like this.

Tales from the Afterlife

In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.
 

You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.
 

You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.
 

But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.
 

That's an excerpt from Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman, emphasis mine.

I was so struck by this passage, this idea that the only thing that made our lives tolerable was the jumbling of all these events into a shuffled sequence that achieved some optimal variety, serendipity, and novelty.

Is the optimal sequencing of events in our lives one that allows us to construct narratives most easily, and is that a sequence that breaks up the monotony of repetition? Studies seem to indicate we are physiologically built for a certain volume of willpower each day, which argues for some optimal sequencing of critical tasks near the front of the day, while that reserve is high. Thus the recommendations to exercise in the morning, or to start your work day tackling the most critical, if least enticing, task on our to-do list.

But that's life hacking territory, and not where I meant to stray. What inspired this post was simply the arresting and elegiac thought exercise from Eagleman.

This is how technological progress works

Generation n-2: This is our save icon. It's for saving a file to a floppy disc.

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Generation n-1: I don't use floppy discs anymore, I only save files to my hard drive, but I remember floppy discs, so the iconography still works for me.

Generation n: Why is that the save icon? 

Generation n-1: Because people used to save files to floppy discs, then later to hard drives, but the icon stuck around. That's a 3 1/2 inch floppy disc, which actually isn't really floppy. There was a 5 1/4" disc which was floppy, but no one uses that as the save icon.

Generation n: Why not update the icon? How about something like one of these instead?

Generation n+1: What does it mean to save a file? Why do we even need that function. I just update my files in Google Docs or Quip, they are always up-to-date.

Generation n+2: What are files?

The Passion of the Christ: Blooper Reel

Pulling links to old McSweeneys humor pieces, I couldn't help but think of one other classic humor piece when I was reading back through the Unused commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky for The Fellowship of the Ring, and that is The Passion of the Christ: Blooper Reel.

Christ, shackled to a stone, is being scourged by Roman soldiers. Blood runs down his gory back. His pain is palpable. 
 

Jesus: [writhes in pain, hands shaking]
 

[Cell phone rings.]
 

Jesus: [hands shake furiously]
 

[Cell phone rings. Caviezel looks up, sheepish.]
 

Roman soldier: Jim? That you?
 

Jesus: Yeah.
 

[Cell phone rings.]
 

Soldier: Want me to get it?
 

Jesus: Yeah.
 

[Roman soldier gingerly reaches into Caviezel’s blood-soaked loincloth, pulls out phone and opens it, then holds the phone to Caviezel’s ear.]
 

Off Camera: [laughter]
 

Jesus: Hey, Mom.

...

The Last Supper. Jesus is in the upper room with his disciples. Judas (Luca Lionello) is seated nearby.

Jesus: If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world—ah, Christ.

Judas: Hateth you. 

Jesus: Who’s on first, right?

Judas: [laughs]

Jesus: [rolls eyes at camera] John could write gospel, but, you know, could he write dialogue?

Off Camera: [laughter] Cut!

Taylor Swift, a Socratic Dialogue

TAYLOR SWIFT: Tell me, Socrates, must the player always play, play, play?
 

SOCRATES: Well, that depends on what it is to be a player and what it means to play. Could you be more specific?
 

SWIFT: I’m thinking of the dirty, dirty cheats of the world. Those about whom so many get down and out while they could be getting down to sick beats. Alcibiades, for example, abandoned Athens and sought refuge in Sparta, then left Sparta for Persia before finally returning to Athens, leaving an inter-imperial trail of broken hearts.
 

SOCRATES: Yes, I see. Alcibiades is, in fact, a player who will play, play, play.
 

SWIFT: Yes, very much so.
 

SOCRATES: But must he? That is the question at hand.
 

SWIFT: I believe he must for, consider that the hater must hate, hate, hate, and the faker must fake, fake, fake. Why should the player be different?
 

From McSweeneys, in sort of what I think of as an exemplar of what one of their homepage humor pieces is like, a bit of a highbrow-lowbrow remix. Since I'm here, some of my other favorites from McSweeneys.

Unused commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky for The Fellowship of the Ring:

ZINN: Well, power needs to have its proxies. That way the damage is always deniable. As long as the Hobbits have the ring, no one will ever question the plot Gandalf has hatched. So here is the big scary ring, and all that happens when Gandalf moves to touch it is that he sees a big flaming eye. And notice it is a… different kind of eye — not like our eye.
 

CHOMSKY: Almost a cat-like eye.
 

ZINN: It’s on fire. Somehow being an on-fire eye is this terrible thing in the minds of those in Middle Earth. I think this is a way of telling others in Middle Earth to be ashamed of their eyes. And of course you see the Orcs’ eyes are all messed up, too. They’re this terrible color. And what does Gandalf tell Frodo about the ring? “Keep it secret. Keep it safe.”
 

CHOMSKY: “Let’s leave the most powerful object in all of Middle Earth with a weak little Hobbit, a race known for its chattering and intoxication, and tell him to keep it a secret.”
 

ZINN: Right. And here we receive our first glimpse of the supposedly dreadful Mordor, which actually looks like a fairly functioning place.
 

CHOMSKY: This type of city is most likely the best the Orcs can do if all they have are cliffs to grow on. It’s very impressive, in that sense.
 

ZINN: Especially considering the economic sanctions no doubt faced by Mordor. They must be dreadful. We see now that the Black Riders have been released, and they’re going after Frodo. The Black Riders. Of course they’re black. Everything evil is always black. And later Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White. Have you noticed that?
 

CHOMSKY: The most simplistic color symbolism.
 

It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers:

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.
 

I may even throw some multi-colored leaves into the mix, all haphazard like a crisp October breeze just blew through and fucked that shit up. Then I’m going to get to work on making a beautiful fucking gourd necklace for myself. People are going to be like, “Aren’t those gourds straining your neck?” And I’m just going to thread another gourd onto my necklace without breaking their gaze and quietly reply, “It’s fall, fuckfaces. You’re either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you’re not.”
 

“Toto's 'Africa'” by Ernest Hemingway:

The plane’s wings were moonlit and reflected the stars. The moonlight had guided him there, toward this salvation. He had stopped an older man along the way, hoping to find some long forgotten words, or perhaps an ancient melody, for such an occasion. The old man had said nothing at first, and instead stared cryptically into the sodden earth. Then he raised his head and turned slowly.
 

“Hurry, boy. It’s waiting there for you,” the old man had said.
 

The one I read every winter during the holidays, as classic as Little Drummer Boy, In Which I Fix My Girlfriend's Grandparents' WiFi and am Hailed as a Conquering Hero:

Some in the kingdom thought the cause of the darkness must be the Router. Little was known of the Router, legend told it had been installed behind the recliner long ago by a shadowy organization known as Comcast. Others in the kingdom believed it was brought by a distant cousin many feasts ago. Concluding the trouble must lie deep within the microchips, the people of 276 Ferndale Street did despair and resign themselves to defeat.
 

But with the dawn of the feast of Christmas did a beacon of hope manifest itself upon the inky horizon. Riding in upon a teal Ford Focus came a great warrior, a suitor of the gentlefolks’ granddaughter. Word had spread through the kingdom that this warrior worked with computers and perhaps even knew the true nature of the Router.
 

The people did beseech the warrior to aid them. They were a simple people, capable only of rewarding him with gratitude and a larger-than-normal serving of Jell-O salad. The warrior considered the possible battles before him. While others may have shirked the duties, forcing the good people of Ferndale Street to prostrate themselves before the tyrants of Comcast, Linksys, and Geek Squad, the warrior could not chill his heart to these depths. He accepted the quest and strode bravely across the beige shag carpet of the living room.
 

Ack, I need to stop. McSweeneys humor pieces are like Doritos or Pringles, you can't eat just one.