I sat down to close 2010 with a traditional favorite-music-of-the year list, only to realize that I am rather far behind in my exposure to new tunes. I'll scrap that idea and instead write about a few music-related memories from this year.
1) Mercer Island Half Marathon
On March 22, I participated for the first time in my hometown's signature running race. I missed the race the prior year due to injury and was recovering from a different injury prior to this one, making this an important psychological event as well as a physical one. I did not appreciate how hilly the course was until I drove it the day before, and I became discouraged about the prospects of hitting either of my goal times. However, moving into the final mile, I realized that I was a lot closer to the finish line than I thought I was. Serendipitously, my playlist reached my finish-line song, "Crawling Through Knives" by In Flames, which always gives me a little adrenaline boost. I accelerated and started passing people, quickly finding myself on the straightaway to the end. I found a final extra gear and sprinted the last 200 yards or so, including the small hill immediately before the finish line, crossing over two minutes ahead of my stretch goal :)
2) Canadian traffic jam
On April 30, Dave, Dan M & I headed north to Vancouver, BC so Dan & I could run the Vancouver Half Marathon on May 2. We left Seattle early to avoid Friday traffic but hit a severe backup anyway just ahead of the tunnel leading into the city. There's no interesting story here. It took us an hour to go just a couple miles. Canadian radio had nothing worth admitting into our earholes, so I put on "Never Trust Anything That Bleeds" by American Eyes. Despite the auspicious start to the weekend, Dan & I both ran a good race.
3) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
We are Sex Bob-Omb!
4) Bumbershoot
I went to see Rise Against, but Weezer.put on my favorite show of the day. Rivers Cuomo had ridiculous amounts of energy, climbing all over the set and stage structure, even leaving the stage entirely to sing a song from the corner of Memorial Stadium. As if Weezer's own catalog of hits wasn't enough, they covered the opening drum solo and guitar lick of Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" and did a full-song version of MGMT's "Kids", inserting a verse of Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" in the middle for good measure. Did I mention that I love cover songs?
5) "Electric Blue" by Icehouse
A song I had long since forgotten gained new significance this year, in a very happy way. Nothing more to share on that ;)
6) BoB's "Magic", featuring Rivers Cuomo
Hey, that's two parts of this list with Rivers in them! I'll end the post with this song. I have a couple specific memories associated with it, but it's included here as representation of a pretty positive year overall for me. I gained quite a bit of confidence in some important areas, and I will close out the year feeling like maybe I do have a bit of magic in me.
Happy new year!
Friday, December 31, 2010
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Traffic management or just bad luck?
Today I picked up my car after scheduled maintenance at the dealership in Lynnwood, and drove from there back to downtown Seattle. I-5 was a parking lot so I elected for Aurora instead. After hitting red lights at the first few traffic signals I wondered if I would be starting and stopping the whole way home and decided to track the lights. I counted 27 traffic lights from the dealership south to Greenlake, of which 17 of them were red for me. Should I be surprised by that result?
If you assume that each light is independent of each other light, and that each light has a 50% chance of being red and a 50% chance of being green, then the chance that I would hit at least 17 red lights out of 27 is 12.39%. Not a high probability (roughly 1 in 8), but not so unexpected that I need to rush out and blog about it.
So 17 out of 27 isn't terribly interesting, but 8 of the first 9 were red- what about that? The chance I would hit at least 8 out of 9 is 1.95%- pretty uncommon (1 in 50) but not unthinkable. However, when you're out driving, there's nothing good on the radio and you just want to get home, 8 out of 9 seems like the world has it out for you.
As I was writing this, I realized that I had to make quite a few assumptions and simplifications to use the calculations above. If you haven't fallen asleep yet, read on:
1) Some of the lights were actually green when I reached them, but there were cars stopped in front of me so I had to do the same. Thus, I counted as red any light where I had to stop or slow to a near stop, regardless of color. During periods of heavy traffic, this could be an unreasonable assumption due to the long lines at traffic lights, but traffic was moderate today so I think this treatment was reasonable.
2) I assumed each traffic light was independent of each other traffic light. This is likely not true, as transportation departments coordinate lights to keep traffic flowing. However, there are many things that can happen to a driver between two lights: slow drivers could impede you, cars can enter and exit the road, and pedestrians can cross outside the crosswalks, so I think it's a reasonable assumption.
3) To simplify things, I assumed that yellow lights were the same as green lights. Since you can go through yellows, I think this is reasonable. By the way, I didn't stop at or go through any yellow lights on my drive.
4) It's possible that I missed a light or two once I got inside Seattle city limits (south of 145th), but I don't think it changes the story much. I hope you'll forgive me for putting accident avoidance ahead of spontaneous probability experiments.
Did I miss anything?
P.S. Rather than go back to first principles and re-learn my college math, I used this site to calculate the probabilities above: http://stattrek.com/Tables/Binomial.aspx
If you assume that each light is independent of each other light, and that each light has a 50% chance of being red and a 50% chance of being green, then the chance that I would hit at least 17 red lights out of 27 is 12.39%. Not a high probability (roughly 1 in 8), but not so unexpected that I need to rush out and blog about it.
So 17 out of 27 isn't terribly interesting, but 8 of the first 9 were red- what about that? The chance I would hit at least 8 out of 9 is 1.95%- pretty uncommon (1 in 50) but not unthinkable. However, when you're out driving, there's nothing good on the radio and you just want to get home, 8 out of 9 seems like the world has it out for you.
As I was writing this, I realized that I had to make quite a few assumptions and simplifications to use the calculations above. If you haven't fallen asleep yet, read on:
1) Some of the lights were actually green when I reached them, but there were cars stopped in front of me so I had to do the same. Thus, I counted as red any light where I had to stop or slow to a near stop, regardless of color. During periods of heavy traffic, this could be an unreasonable assumption due to the long lines at traffic lights, but traffic was moderate today so I think this treatment was reasonable.
2) I assumed each traffic light was independent of each other traffic light. This is likely not true, as transportation departments coordinate lights to keep traffic flowing. However, there are many things that can happen to a driver between two lights: slow drivers could impede you, cars can enter and exit the road, and pedestrians can cross outside the crosswalks, so I think it's a reasonable assumption.
3) To simplify things, I assumed that yellow lights were the same as green lights. Since you can go through yellows, I think this is reasonable. By the way, I didn't stop at or go through any yellow lights on my drive.
4) It's possible that I missed a light or two once I got inside Seattle city limits (south of 145th), but I don't think it changes the story much. I hope you'll forgive me for putting accident avoidance ahead of spontaneous probability experiments.
Did I miss anything?
P.S. Rather than go back to first principles and re-learn my college math, I used this site to calculate the probabilities above: http://stattrek.com/Tables/Binomial.aspx
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