Thinking in Target Foreign Languages,

As my retirement date nears, I am looking for new ways to approach various interests and how to make progress in them.  One of these interests is foreign language learning.  One thing I have been hesitant over the past years is thinking in the target languages.  We all think in our own "best" languages, even sub-vocalizing in the process.  That doesn't mean that I instantly conjure up grammatically complete sentences in my mind with any level of sophistication regarding word choices.  But I do think in English, although more in a stream-of-consciousness mode.  The same can be true with languages I am learning, but I need to be intentional about thinking in them since the tendency is always to slip back into English.  I saw a YouTube video on this very subject...click HERE for a link to it.  Another thing about learning foreign languages has to do with the pervasive use of computers and the Internet in this regard.  In earlier years I would read texts and various materials in the foreign language, look up the meanings of new words and record my progress with pen and paper within a notebook. Now some of these language learning sites like LingQ and Anki will track my own vocabulary-building progress as well as providing convenient definitions and sentence examples...that's great! But ultimately, when it comes to reviewing what I've learned...or forgotten that I've learned...I think I need to return to my old tried-and-true comfortable method of writing down my progress on paper because engaging in it this way helps more to reinforce my learning.  Now to set up my system... 

Weekly Short Stories: 1998 Science Fiction, Part 6

Once again Wednesday has arrived, so it's time for me to delve into the next stories as they appear in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixteenth Annual Collection, featuring the late editor's selections from the year 1998. Dozois, who had a special affinity for novellas, included two in a row...somehow I managed to get through both in time to write about them in today's article...

THE DAYS OF SOLOMON GURSKY by Ian McDonald

Told in elapsing episodes starting in the present and spreading far into the distant future and throughout the cosmos, a scientist has developed a formula for resurrecting the dead and in the process runs afoul of a megalomaniacal corporate figure who reminds me too much of Elon Musk.  As the novella progresses, the narrative becomes too distant from our familiar points of reference regarding reality and technology...that's my own problem as a reader but it still was difficult to slog through.  The story's ending, though, was awesome...

THE CUCKOO'S BOYS by Robert Reed

Written some twenty-or-so years before the COVID debacle, a scientist comes across a way to transmit, virus-like, his own genes through a targeted female population to produce offspring cloned with his own version of what constitutes genius.  The experiment gets out of hand, becomes a pandemic...and he is left as a mentor to some of his now-teenage products in the face of the violent prejudice arising against them...

Next week: more sci-fi from '98...

Returning to My Old Coffee Shop Routine?

Back in the "old days" of when I first moved to Gainesville...namely the period from 1978 to 1985...I tended to spend a lot of time studying in local coffee/donut shops and diners.  I love to learn, although my knowledge is pretty spread out across the academic spectrum...perhaps a little too thinly, I might admit.  But I do like from time to time getting out and sitting in a public setting. I think my greatest progress in foreign language study has been from doing this, but sometimes I just read, speculate, or plan what I'm going to do in the immediate and near future.  Seeing how I'm retiring at the end of next week, it seems that the future is going to be much more conducive for this kind of activity.  Who knows, maybe I'll actually learn something in depth. I had been considering frequenting a couple of places reasonably near to my home...one sells bagels and the other donuts...but alas they both close at 2 pm, so for the mid-afternoon and later it's going to have to be somewhere else.  And of course, there are plenty of "somewhere elses"...

Why Not Have 30 Kilometer Running Races?

While I was contemplating which of the three offered races I would run in this weekend...along with the multiple distances for two of them...it once again occurred to me that there is a substantial, significant gap between two of the distances.  The so-called "classic" running races are 5K (3.1 miles), 10K (6.2 miles), 15K (9.3 miles), half-marathon (13.1 miles) and marathon (26.2 miles).  I've covered all of these in races since I returned to running in my early fifties, but that huge gap separating half from full marathons is very imposing: 13.1 miles!  Yet looking at it logically, there could be another distance offered that gives people the chance to either work themselves up to that marathon distance or find their own most suitable distance.  And that is the 30K race, 18.6 miles long and a fitting intermediary between the half and full marathons.  I wonder why this distance isn't ever offered...I think it's a shame.  I certainly would be one of the ones lining up to run in one of these..

About the Many Virtual NYC Marathon YouTube Videos

Back on November 3rd the 2024 edition of the New York City Marathon happened, complete with its 50 thousand-plus entrants and the meandering course covering all of the Big Apple's five boroughs...in many ways it has become the most sought after long distance running event, even more than the Boston Marathon.  For a year or two I've enjoyed watching point-of-view YouTube videos recorded by some of the runners, lasting the entire race.  Some runners were fast, some average and there was one excessively slow dude.  Each video revealed some of that runner's personality and background while also showing their experiences as they ran past exuberant, cheering crowds.  For the most part, I like these videos and even exercise to them at home.  But three weeks ago, one of the marathon runners, Matt Choi...who is one of those social media "influencers" who earn money making themselves visible while promoting their sponsors' products...was permanently banned from all New York City races because he violated their rules by having cyclists in the midst of the crowded race, filming him from different angles while interfering with and endangering other runners.  I know that if I were such a runner, having gone through the difficult process of just getting accepted to run the race, then paying the expensive entry fee and making arrangements for staying up there...and then struggling to complete the event...I would have been put out and insulted by this one person acting as if I was "in the way" of his own entitled project.  And apparently the New York Road Runners, the organizers of this race and many others in the area, agreed when they banned Choi.  The incident got me to thinking about all those videos...I've found about nine so far...showing the race and all those other runners alongside them.  Usually the videos show what it would be like from a runner's viewpoint, showing what lies ahead and with the backs of the runners ahead of them on the course.  I'm fine with that, but a couple of the video recorders have a tendency to move their cameras to face backwards, behind themselves showing the faces and numbered bibs of the other racers.  I know that were I in such a race, I definitely would NOT like someone with a camera set on me without my permission...yet these people seem clueless about any such potential objection from others.  This virtual filming of races seems to be a male phenomenon. I have yet to see such a video produced for the NYC Marathon...or any other race shown this way on YouTube, for that matter...by a woman: I wonder if this means anything.  The NYC rule-makers clearly prohibit certain kinds of devices for runners to film the race, yet one of them clearly was violating it (he was one of those panning behind him for stretches of time).   I for one enjoy this vicarious type of racing experience I can do from my own living room, giving me a sense of the race environment and surrounding locale.  But it kind of makes me cringe to see the camera pointed for lengths of time at people who clearly had not assented to it.  On one level, it's a major public event, but on another, there are some privacy issues not being properly addressed...

Ran This Morning's Depot Parkrun 5K Here in Gainesville

This morning here in northern Florida it finally began to feel like the fall season, belatedly now in mid-November.  The temperature at 7:30, when the  Depot Parkrun 5K started, was 51 with a 96% humidity...a little chilly but in all, quite pleasant.  I decided to run the race this time since I had speed-walked a half-marathon last Sunday.  I thought that maybe I could improve on my Parkrun personal best time of 26:51 and started out fast, finding a strongly-paced couple ahead of me to follow closely.  That kept me honest with my own pacing, but by the end of the third lap in this four-lap race, they began to pull away from me.  Still, I stuck to it and finished running hard, attaining that personal best: 26 minutes 31 seconds.  No doubt the cooler temperature helped a lot with my performance, and I'm looking forward to cooler times ahead as fall eventually morphs into winter.  Click HERE to view today's posted results... 

Quote of the Week...from Neil deGrasse Tyson

There is no greater education than one that is self-driven.            Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of the best known astrophysicists today because of his communication skills and passion for making science popular through his podcasts and series.  I've quoted him extensively over the years, but I don't think I ever got around to the above quip, which I've heard others paraphrase (or maybe Tyson is paraphrasing them).  It's a great truth that I've lived over my life span, especially during my school years when I learned so much...but not so much from the officially-established curricula I was ultimately graded on.  I have always been independent in my scholarly pursuits, and the areas I have grown adept in aren't necessarily high on the academic totem pole.  I would like to add to Tyson's quote my opinion that another type of important education is the kind that comes from adversity, setbacks, disappointments...and even tragedy.  It's not as fun to point to this aspect of learning, but bad stuff does happen to us from time to time and it's how we learn to respond to it that often makes us stronger, more mature and, yes, better educated...

New Tropical Storm Sara Named, In Western Caribbean

In keeping with my earlier declaration that I would keep up with named tropical storms in this 2024 Atlantic Hurricane season, I'm reporting today on the latest one, Sara.  It's just been named, after forming an identifiable circulation and developing sustained winds now at 40 mph in the far-western Caribbean Sea, just skirting the northern coast of Honduras, Sara is headed westward, destined to make landfall at the country of Belize and then on through the southeastern part of Mexico before emerging in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico.  There the various meteorological computer models have it strengthening and turning toward the northeast...that is, toward Florida.  Great, that's all we need, a fourth hurricane.  It's not all happening at once, though: it shouldn't be until early next week when we'll have some more definitive information on how strong Sara will get and where it will go... 

Weekly Short Stories: 1998 Science Fiction, Part 5

It's Wednesday and once again time to examine some short fiction as I continue going through the extensive year-by-year anthology series The Year's Best Science Fiction, this volume Sixteenth Annual Collection covering the year 1998 with editor Gardner Dozois' selections.  Here are my reactions to the next two stories in the book as I read it...

DIVIDED BY INFINITY by Robert Charles Wilson

A retired accountant is in deep, suicidal melancholy over his wife's recent death, but at the brink of taking overdoses he always stops.  One day he discovers in the city a used bookstore that contains certain volumes, apparently written by famous authors but which he has never recognized before.  Meeting with the store's aged and eccentric owner, he is given a strange book titled You Will Never Die after that owner informs him that they are both immortal.  How it all works gets revealed as the story progresses...quite a brilliant foray into metaphysics...

US by Howard Waldrop

The tragic kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's infant son in the early 1930's and its aftermath is treated here according to alternative outcomes of the event and how they might end up drastically affecting young Lindbergh's subsequent life course...told in three different narratives. There are always those punctuated events that have a drastic effect on history...such as the Kennedy assassination or 9/11...but each of us in our own more "ordinary" lives get steered in different directions by these types of things as well, occurring on a smaller scale... 

 

Next week: more sci-fi from the year 1998...

Retirement Affords Me Time for Language Learning

I am looking forward to the time afforded me after my impending retirement, time that I can use to pursue various interests.  Among these is language learning. Although I have studied a number of different languages over the years, I've reached the conclusion that in order to develop a truly adequate comprehension of any of them, I need to learn many thousands more words, which involves extensive reading and listening.  So I've pared down the languages I will be focusing on to three, all of which I've studied to a considerable degree already: Chinese, Russian and Spanish.  With the advent of AI and its usefulness with foreign language study, along with the many apps available...free or with subscription, I think I'm quite ready to make the final push in these three languages to becoming comfortable with them.  But I like the process of learning as well: should be fun...

Saluting Veterans

On this Veteran's Day in 2024, I salute all those fellow Americans who have served in our armed forces, some paying the ultimate price during their tenures.  Before 1973, young men, even if not voluntarily recruited, would be drafted in a lottery system, compelled to serve.  And during wars such as World War II, Korea and Vietnam, many were wounded or died...all coming out of the experience irreversibly changed.  After the draft was replaced by a fully-volunteer force, those who enlisted went through periods of relative peace and some of wartime...the Persian Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan were the most intense periods and produced the most casualties since the Vietnam era...but there were also Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Haiti.  And our armed forces are contributing strongly to the maintenance of worldwide stability today. When someone first enters the military, it may be a period of relative peace...but this can quickly change, so for all veterans who performed their duty during both times of peace and conflict, I appreciate your service and sacrifice.  Thank you!

Walked the Tom Walker Half-Marathon This Morning

When I signed up to enter Gainesville's top November running race, the Tom Walker Half-Marathon, I decided to try something new: speed-walk the entire 13.1-mile distance along the Hawthorne Trail southeast of town.  I wanted to see how my endurance would handle walking all-out for this distance as well as whether I could do it in less than 3 hours.  As it turned out, the answers were both a resounding "yes".  Although this course is pretty hilly and the weather was unseasonably warm and muggy, I stuck to my standard race-walking pace that I used for 5K races and extended it more than fourfold, finishing in 2 hours 54 minutes 40 seconds.  There were quite a few people in this race...206 finished.  I placed at #176 overall but that was of course due to me walking the whole course.  The Florida Track Club organizes this event and in their email not only warned participants to not necessarily attempt to set personal time records due to the warm and humid conditions, but also pointed to not having enough volunteers to run it as well as in previous years.  And that's true on both counts, especially regarding the fact that for most of the course there were no mile markers.  But for those who did volunteer, they were all very friendly and helpful.  For the first time in a distance race I used energy gels (three times) and they seemed to help.  I also had a playlist of favorite songs I listened to throughout this long, long walk.  How did I physically feel during the race?  While maintaining pretty much the same pace throughout...as well as up and down hills...I never felt winded or tired.  But my legs and feet began to ache early on and this intensified as the miles piled up, although it never got to the point where I felt like slowing down or stopping.  This was my 18th overall half-marathon finish (I began them in 2010) and my 6th with the Tom Walker Half-Marathon, tying my total with the now-defunct LifeSouth Five Points of Life event.  If you want to view the results, click HERE. I'm writing this later in the afternoon and, other than some expected leg aches, feel totally okay.  Oh, one other thing: deliberately walking in a race like this does demand a bit of humility on the part of the one doing it, because you know up front that most everyone will pass you and you'll be listed near the bottom of finishers without recognition that you chose to speed-walk it.  Since I'm beyond those concerns, I also enjoyed being not only more aware of the beautiful surrounding scenery in such a race, but also found that it made absolutely no difference to me whether I was walking on a flat surface or going up and down hills, no matter how steep.  I think that with today's results I might just try a full 26.2 mile marathon and see whether I can't walk the whole thing in less than 6 hours. But then maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself... 

Volunteered at Today's Depot Parkrun 5K

Since I am planning to enter tomorrow's Tom Walker Half-Marathon, I thought I would take advantage of tapering down before that race by skipping my customary Saturday morning Depot Parkrun 5K, instead opting to volunteer there.  And since this weekly free race...runners and walkers are equally encouraged to participate...is completely run by volunteers, I do step up from time to time, although probably less than the organizers would like.  Today I was the finishing-token sorter, which is basically collecting scanned little laminated plastic barcoded cards and lining them up in numerical order...technical stuff that doesn't involve heavy amounts of interaction with others, although in the end I found myself conversing a lot with those around me.  It all went well, and I noticed that some of the usual top-finishing runners took it easy with today's event, no doubt because they...like me...plan to race tomorrow morning.  See ya there, although I'll definitely be spending most of my time way behind, at the back of the pack, testing my ability to walk fast for a considerable distance...

Quote of the Week...from Bilbo Baggins

I think I'm quite ready for another adventure.          ---Bilbo Baggins 

I'm not sure whether J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved elder hobbit, chief protagonist of his novel The Hobbit and a bit player in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, speaks the above quote in the latter series.  But in the final Lord of the Rings movie, The Return of the King, he utters it as his old friend Gandalf invites him on the boat that will take them to the fabled Grey Havens at the end of the saga.  And like Bilbo, I, too, am ready for another adventure...a string of them, in fact.  But let's start with what is immediately before me.  On Sunday I plan to speed-walk my first half-marathon race...I've run the previous 17 since 2010.  It's the Tom Walker Half-Marathon, which I've run 5 time before, including the last two years.  It runs along the Hawthorne Trail, leaving and returning to Boulware Springs Park off SE 15 Street in Gainesville.  I've been wanting to see how fast I could speed-walk this kind of distance and how my energy level would flow during longer races.  Well, here goes.  As for more adventures, let's just say that I'm looking forward to my retirement which begins after my final scheduled workday on November 29th...

A Brief Note About the Recent Election

Just a brief note on the recently transpired general election.  Yes, we are all on a runaway train...hopefully it won't crash.  Never before have I felt so alienated from those around me.  I feel that too many of my compatriots are in a state of voluntary self-brainwashing, comfortable in their own designed (by others) social and mass media feedback loops.  The funny thing is that, when politics is factored out of the equation, everyone for the most part seems pretty normal and coherent.  I know many wonderful people in my life who, for some reason, go off the skids when it comes to politics.  Oh well is all I can say, I guess it's part of being a human being in the year 2024.  On the other hand, I don't have to be in a state of voluntary servitude to media.  Just turn it off, or at least pause a moment before settling on a channel or posting.  This is just as important following such an election as it is preceding it.  As I mentioned in a previous article, I'm done with it all.  Sure, I plan to occasionally read up on the issues and candidates and vote in future elections, but beyond that, don't bother me about your political notions, which were probably spoon-fed to you by some mass-media hack or social-media agenda-driven foreign hacker...

Weekly Short Stories: 1998 Science Fiction, Part 4

As I (slowly) go through the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixteenth Annual Collection, which includes his picks of short sci-fi-from 1998, I've once again encountered one of his several novellas...so there's just one entry below.  In 1998 I briefly tried running again, after some 22-23 years of having abandoned the activity.  Still, I had maintained a good level of cardiovascular condition through much bike riding over those years, and got to a three-mile/per run level of activity during the first few months of the years before I again lost interest...not to pick back up on it until 2007.  Anyway, here's my reaction to that story...

SEA CHANGE, WITH MONSTERS by Paul J. McAauley

After reading Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2061 (in the 2001: A Space Odyssey series) a few years ago, it was fun to see Jupiter's waterbound, ice-covered moon readdressed.  This time it was in greater detail, with of course a much different story line.  Here it's many more years into the future and humanity has explored and settled throughout the habitable solar system.  A recent war between Earth and those living on Europa has resulted in the former's victory and the latter's subjugation under their resented occupation.  The war involved Earth sending genetically-created "monsters" to Europa's seas to wipe out their indigenous life and starve out the people.  A local, mysterious monastery on the moon requests an investigation into what they say is one of the monsters still prowling around their premises.  When the investigator (the story's protagonist) arrives, she not only encounters prejudice from the all-male order there, but also more mystery than she had anticipated.  It's a good tale, and I blame myself and my current circumstances for not having been fully involved with it...

Next Wednesday, we'll see if I can't come up with another installment in this weekly series...

Rafael the Latest Storm in 2024 Atlantic Hurricane Season

Tropical Storm Rafael has been born in the western Caribbean and, this morning so far, carries 60 mph sustained winds as it strengthens into what possibly could be a Category Two hurricane after it enters the Gulf of Mexico in a couple of days.  That should concern anyone living near the Gulf Coast, but so far the predicted trajectory, a composite of numerous diverse meteorological projections, has it aimed toward the Louisiana coast.  Plus, the cooler waters in the northern Gulf should eventually weaken it.  Still, Rafael could be the source of a lot of rainfall toward the end of this week, even in Gainesville where I'm planning on entering a long-distance race on Sunday.  It seems this 2024 hurricane season that these storms seem bent on messing up my races: the sooner it ends the better... 

Thoughts While Watching NYC Marathon Coverage on ABC Today

I was sitting here a little while ago, surfing the TV channels, when I noticed that ABC was covering the New York City Marathon in its afternoon lineup today.  They were at the finishing line in Central Park, the camera looking down on participants as they trudged on through after a 26.2 mile grueling course that goes through all five boroughs of the "Big Apple": first Staten Island for the briefest time, then across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and to Brooklyn for a long stretch, then relatively briefly through Queens, followed by a long bridge crossing over the East River to Manhattan, on briefly through the Bronx and then back through Manhattan to the Central Park finish.  The featured finishing times were really slow, going over seven hours, and the "runners" for the most part looked pretty out of shape, probably because they were.  Still, I liked the fact that this particular marathon doesn't impose strict time duration limits for the race and are fine with people walking it.  Taking ten hours to complete a marathon does strike me as being a little excessively long, but I think the organizers know what they are doing...especially when one "chamber of commerce" type person, interviewed on the ABC show, shared how all the runners (more than fifty thousand) and other visitors for the event greatly stimulated the local businesses with all their spending.  I thought yes, that sounds like the New York City I knew when I visited there back in 2010...they sure do love our money! Still, I'm quite comfortable with a course limit of, say, seven hours as being reasonable.  Here in Gainesville we had something like this for years with the great Five Points of Life Marathon, and in nearby Ocala's own marathon.  That gave speed-walkers a chance to participate, as well as more elderly runners and those practicing the Galloway run-walk method.  Here in Gainesville we have three marathons offered annually, all taking place on the remote Hawthorne Trail southeast of town, away from the city bustle...so there's absolutely no problem with shutting down street traffic during the races.  Yet the organizers on their websites have set unreasonable time limits of five hours for the finishers...although they seem to have begrudgingly posted slower runners' finishing times in the past.  I have run one official marathon, the one in Ocala (2011), and during it had to walk the final seven miles with an IT strain, with a time of six hours, four minutes.  Yet earlier that month on my own neighboring training course I ran a marathon in four hours twenty-three minutes.  At this stage in my life I've stopped caring whether or not anyone believes...without a posted "official" time as proof...that I completed a marathon distance run.  To me it's now a matter of the experience and my own expectations of myself.  I don't need cameras showing me grinning crossing the finishing line or crowds of people cheering me on in order to derive pleasure and meaning from my activity.  I'd like to try a marathon race at some time in the near future, but the organizers around where I live seem elitist and unaccommodating.  I still do the half-marathons around here, but the atmosphere toward anyone but-the-fastest tackling marathon-distance races held in the Gainesville area seems hostile and elitist...

Ran Gainesville's Weekly Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

Today, the first Saturday morning in November, the day before we turn our clocks back an hour to return to good old Standard Time (with late afternoon darkness), I got up and made it down to Gainesville's pretty Depot Park to engage in yet another Parkrun 5K there.  And, again, I decided to run it (instead of speed-walking) in spite of the 100% humidity and 64 degrees...not exactly pleasant conditions but not unbearable, either.  There weren't as many folks there today, and many chose to walk it...I totally understand.  But in spite of the mugginess, I somehow finished 12th, with a time of 26:56, just 5 seconds slower than my fastest Parkrun finish...click HERE to view today's results.  I always enjoy the positive, encouraging atmosphere there although with the shared pathway with dogs and little kiddies straying this way and that it can be a bit of a challenge to just avoid colliding or tripping over others.  But that all goes with the territory, as they say, and I enjoyed the overall experience.  Next week I plan to volunteer during the Parkrun, as the next day on Sunday the Florida Track Club is holding its annual Tom Walker Half-Marathon, which I usually run...although I'm considering speed-walking the 13.1 miles this time around.  That is, assuming we don't get slammed by the next hurricane in the meantime...

Quote of the Week...from Groucho Marx

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.                                                    ---Groucho Marx

Sounds like Groucho, doesn't it...of course, he was the cynical, talkative member of the renowned comedy group of brothers that produced a string of very funny movies during the first couple of decades in the talking movie era.  Yes, the quote is funny, but it's also so, so true.  Yet, I think in today's world of widespread gaslighting...outright lying about reality to trash one's opponent...Groucho, if he were around today, might consider extending it with another witty barb.  Here in Florida we're closing out our second week of early voting for the 2024 general election, and next Tuesday is the official Election Day...all before the losers start crying foul.  I voted a few days ago and, for me, that's it.  Done. I have my own life to live, and if anyone else wants to rant and rave and riot and march and whatever, then they can be my guest...just (with a nod to the late Chris Cornell of Soundgarden) keep it off my wave...