Adventures in Onionism

I wrote the code to transparently and reproducibly run the High Lonesome 100 lottery, which will be conducted tonight (November 15, 2019). The code is available on Github here , and the web app to actually implement the lottery is here . The app has all the details and instructions, but simply put, you just need to pick the seed for R's pseudo-random number generator (PRNG). I don't understand all the gory details of how PRNGs work, but basically, if you write code involving randomly generated numbers, you can set the seed so that every time the code is run you get the same answer. In order to fairly set the seed, the race director Caleb Efta will have public participants roll several 10-sided dice at Laws Whiskey Bar in Denver Colorado tonight. If you didn't set a seed, the code would give you a different answer every time you ran it, so participants couldn't be sure which run the actual results came from. If we just picked some arbitrary seed (my usual is 1492) then...

My third straight 34+ hour 100, and it hurt. Actually my fourth, if you count Hardrock 2017, but that wasn't nearly as big a disappointment, since Hardrock is supposed to take me that long--I finished right on my average Ultrasignup score of 70% (winner's time/my time) and a solid 36 place/126 finishers. In the last three races (Grindstone, Massanutten, High Lonesome) I finished 59%, 62%, 64% (Ultrasignup) and place 145/207 (70%), 79/96 (82%), 68/86 (79%). Anyway, cart before horse. What about the race itself? I flew to Denver Wednesday, and drove to Salida Thursday. I showed up at the high school for race check-in and was disappointed to learn that everyone had checked in, meaning I wouldn't be getting in off the waitlist. I spent the next several hours buying and downloading maps and making alternate plans with my would-be pacers. After settling on a plan (the three southernmost 14ers of Nolans Friday and 30 miles of the crest of another range Saturday), getting my da...