Adventures in Onionism

The GZA and I saw Wild . It was pretty not-good. Not terribly bad, but also not good. There were only a few awful lines of dialogue that reeked of trite Oprah-esque 'live your best life' platitudes, so I wasn't exactly repulsed by anything, but I didn't get drawn in by anything either. Visually, the movie wasn't terribly impressive--it was largely filmed in central/eastern Oregon instead of on the actual PCT, and I could tell. The CGI fox also sucked. How hard is it to train a fox to stand there and stare at you for 20 seconds before running away? That's what every fox I've ever seen did without any training, so I can't imagine training one would be that much more expensive than crappy CGI. Anyway, you shouldn't visually expect Brokeback , or Sweetgrass , or Into the Wild. Story-wise, I actually like the book more than the movie. You got to know more characters, and became more invested in their story. Both the book and the movie are told non-l...

Jan 11: Tilden Orienteering ( BAOC ) Jan 31: Fremont Fat Ass 50K OR Ordnance 100K Feb 21: Montara Mountain 50K March 7: Way Too Cool 50K (lottery) March 21: 4MPH Challenge April 10-11: Zion 100M or Lake Sonoma 50M (lottery) April 18: Mokelumne 50M May 2: MeOw! Marathons June 6: Bone Tempest (off the radar) June 20: SF Solstice 24 Hour July 31/Aug 1: Tushar 100M Aug 22: Waldo 100K (lottery) Aug 29: Tamalpa Headlands 50k   Sep 5: Rogaining in Henry Coe Sep 12: Plain 100 Sep 19: IMTUF 100 Sep 25-26: The Bear 100 Oct 10-11: Euchre Bar Massacre That would be 16 ultras, including five 100-milers, with three Hardrock qualifiers in three weeks, and three insane off-trail bushwhacking events, plus a couple orienteering events. I've never done more than 8 ultras in a year before, but I am unlikely to get picked in all the lotteries. I'm not 100% sure about all these, but I'm quite excited about many. I will be teaching a course at USF on Mondays Spring Semester...

I've been busy the last two days with the annual meeting of my employer, the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences ( BITSS ). Thursday morning we did a training session on registrations, pre-analysis plans, the Open Science Framework , R, RStudio, git, GitHub, writing a project protocol, and the Harvard Dataverse. (Maybe we bit off more than we could chew in that session?) Thursday afternoon we heard from some of the leaders in the research transparency movement: Ted Miguel (Berkeley), John Ioannidis (Stanford), Brian Nosek (UVA/Center for Open Science), Jack Molyneaux (Millennium Challenge Corporation), Victoria Stodden (UIUC). Friday we heard about recent research in transparency, including my presentation of a draft of the Manual of Best Practices in Transparent Social Science Research. People seemed to really like it. My slides and the draft manual are all on my github account. If you're into research transparency, we're encouraging open partic...

Thanksgiving with gf and some hiking friends I haven't seen in too long. Pleasanton Ridge, American River, Truckee, Sierra Buttes, Downieville, North San Juan, Yuba River, Nevada City, Berkeley hills. Diablo Titan California Poppy One with gills One with slime The Destroying Angel Jack O Lanterns, not chanterelles Friends came over My little brother can fly Yuba Yuba Ewww Coral mushroom We camp Downieville Sierra Buttes Pleasanton Ridge Home

Good movie. I cried. Enjoyment is likely strongly correlated with one's own lone-wolf adventurer status, however. Today's the last day to put in for Western States. I'd have approximately a 7% chance of being picked. I'm already in for the Hardrock lottery; I should have somewhere between a 10-15% chance of being picked, based on previous lottery entries (3 by their count) and assuming that the increased pool in the never-started lottery (from 35 to 47) more than offsets any increase in applicants. There are no refunds, it's $400, they're too close together to run both fast, and I much prefer Hardrock. But given the ~0.7% chance of being selected in both, I think I should put in for both. States is on a 2^(n-1) ticket system like where n=consecutive previous applications, so I can start building up for a few years from now when I'm actually excited about it. (Hardrock is on the same system, only applications don't have to be consecutive.) But hey, i...

I'm in Charlottesville, VA at the moment, visiting at the Center for Open Science . (If you're interested in doing reproducible research, their Open Science Framework tool will likely be helpful.) We had a pretty fascinating meeting with lots of top researchers in the transparency movement earlier this week, which I blogged about it over on the BITSS blog , where' I'll occasionally be writing. 

My pages from the books placed at EBM a few weeks ago. Such a fun run. I'm cleaning and packing to move across town. MUCH nicer place, smaller room but bigger house, no views but equally close to parks and off-leash places for George.

I'm back from a week of working remotely in Florida. Other than the fact that gf was sick practically the whole time and I dropped and cracked the screen of my phone, it was great. Perfect weather and the bugs weren't that bad. I mean, I did find seven ticks embedded in me, but stuff happens. Basically, if it's not summer, you wear a mosquito headnet, travel by kayak or canoe, and find a place without many people, Florida isn't so bad. Getting to work Remind me why I became an economist? Mangroves moving north with climate change "They're all dead. Let's go home." Bushwhacking for Science

Woohoo! I ran the Euchre Bar Massacre 50-miler yesterday. In its second year, the Massacre is a fat ass (a low key fun run) in the North Fork of the American River. I've been told about the North Fork before, but it hadn't really registered. Now I understand, and I will definitely be going back. The race is in the Barkley style--off trail, a ridiculous amount of steep climbing, minimal aid stations, and books placed in the woods. You rip your bib number's page out of the book as you go along to prove that you covered the ground you were supposed to. The organizer asked us not to share the directions or map with those not involved, so I'll only post this elevation profile. Look at it! A thing of beauty. By my Garmin: 18,820 feet of climbing in 46 miles, or slightly steeper than Hardrock. The entire race is probably closer to 60 miles, but unfortunately I did not finish. The race is best thought of in terms of hills, of which there are 8. There were only two cutoff...