Been a while

Hello from the sunny coast of the South of France! As usual these days I will start with a short apology for the great deal of time that has passed since the previous post. Sorry about that. I will now continue this same early-post pattern and move on to the explanation(s) for the aforementioned (and likely/hopefully observed) large interval of time between this current post and the most recent (if you can even use the word 'recent' in this context) one. So here goes. First, Hannah takes a lot of time. Obviously. Second, we are trying to train for an Ironman which should take a lot of time too but we're not really succeeding so far. Which might seem counter-intuitive (i.e. we're not succeeding in properly training but I still mentioned it as a reason/excuse for not getting around to adding to GWMD / it's taking a lot of time). But just trying to do something and failing is also time-draining it turns out. Third, we bought (or are in the process of buying) an apartment. That is both time-consuming and super stressful it turns out but hopefully it will be the right decision in the long run. Fourth, we escaped to Südtirol for a short vacation in the mountains last week where computers (and therefore blog-posting) are not allowed. And now that I'm at a conference in Toulon, it seems as good a time as any to finally put some words-to-page (so to speak).

For our trip to Südtirol, we drove a (borrowed) Peugeot 107 from Munich amongst the Alps, through Austria, and into northern Italy to the town of Monguelfo. Our hotel sat on the side of a hill (note that 'hill' in Dolomites language means a jagged mountain in the range of 1500m of elevation whereas 'hill' in Southern-Ontario language [for example] means the Bowler Bump; I am using the former definition in this context) just above the town-proper of Monguelfo and our group of 4 grown people and 2 tiny people were for the majority of our stay the only souls staying in the hotel. On our first day there we drove to a nearby lake in 90 km/h [estimate] freezing-cold wind because apparently it's the site where a famous Italian TV show is filmed. After spending approximately 7 seconds outside of the car and just barely staving off hypothermia, we ran back to the car and began driving back to the hotel. On the way back, however, we noticed something quite incredible: pro cycling team buses (many of them) all parked at a roadside hotel. Hundreds of mechanics outside the buses (despite the almost-sub-zero temperatures) prepping bicycles, cleaning them, cleaning the team cars to be shiny and new looking for the TV cameras. What was this madness?

The Tour of the Alps (formerly known as the Giro del Trentino), of course. The third stage (and first mountain stage) of the 5-day race was set to begin the following morning from the town of Villabassa/Niederdorf (cool Südtirol fact: all place names have both an Italian and German version; Monguelfo's German version is Welsberg, incidentally), which is just down the road from where we were staying. I quickly consulted the stage route (vacation-Internet-bans be damned) and discovered even more interestingly that the cyclists would pass right in front of our hotel (well, at the bottom of the hill on the main road) approximately six minutes after the race began at 11 AM the following day. Ciclismo Internacional's prognosis for the stage was: "still lots of snow and freezing temperatures. Just weeks before the Giro, this will not please most of the bunch". And later: "the weather makes this stage a total lottery. If you are going to the Giro [ed: d'Italia -- starting in 2 weeks time] as a favourite, there is no way you would risk anything for a stage win here. The descents will be a nightmare and we could see a huge number of riders abandon the race early, maybe even some of the big favourites". So that at least somewhat confirms my descriptions of the rather chilly state of affairs that we were confronted with up in the Dolomiti mountains.

The next morning we (embarrassingly) drove the Peugeot down the hill to the main road (an approximately 900 m drive) and began to wait in anticipation. After 15 minutes or so our patience was rewarded with, first, a breakaway group, then a chasing group trying to decided if they would keep up the chase or not, and then a very cold-looking peloton:

We then drove back up the hill, Hannah went to bed, and I think we drank 2 or 3 coffees.

Some other highlights from the trip include the copious amounts of sodiumlicious Dolomiten food. Hannah was an especially big fan eating more at each meal than we typical see her eat in an entire week. The weather warmed up a little bit for the final couple of days of the trip and we did some small hikes in the mountains with our newly acquired baby-hiking-backup that Hannah quite enjoyed. We made it home around dinnertime on Saturday evening which gave us just enough time to invite our friendly banker to our house and sign the rest of our lives away to the good people at Deutsche Bank. I then quickly re-packed my suitcase, slept for a handful of hours, and then headed north to the airport for a short flight down to my favourite French city beginning with an M, Marseille. It's good to be back!

Springtime is a wonderful time to visit the South of France because there are relatively few tourists, it's much warmer than it is in the Dolomiti, and everything is green; the hot summer sun has yet to turn all of the lawns and trees light brown and sitting in the sun is inviting rather than something to be avoided. I am currently in Toulon which is a fairly small port town about 45 minutes east of Marseille, but something they also have (in the port as a matter of fact) is a 50 m open-air swimming pool. During lunch on the first of the conference that I'm attending I made a visit to said swimming pool and opted for a short swim. Unfortunately for me I had forgotten that open air swimming pools imply direct sun exposure that you don't really feel because it's not "summer hot" yet and you're in a nice cool swimming pool and you don't necessarily think about the fact that your skin is being attacked by photons colliding with your cells at speeds of 3.0 x 10^8 m/s. Woops. Luckily I became cognizant of the above facts approximately three-quarters of the way into my originally planned swim workout and at that point exited the pool and finished my swim in the much less enjoyable 25 m indoor "bassin d'hiver" and thereby avoided as bad of a burn as I might have gotten if I'd stayed out there for the remaining few minutes.

What else can I tell you? Hannah and Sandi will arrive on Thursday and we will meet in the town of La Ciotat. For the few of you who don't already know, La Ciotat is home to the oldest functioning cinema in the world and also lays claim to the birth of the game of Pétanque. We will make sure to get in at least one game before we head back to Germany next week.

Until next time...

Dispatches from the Frontlines

1. Pemulis's best blogger friend is Mr. D.C. Rain Maker (www.dcrainmaker.com) and in between his widely-read and highly-influential posts on product reviews of "consumer fitness technology" he also has a weekly feature called "Five Random Things I did this Weekend" (not sure on which words should / shouldn't be capitalized but it's something close to that). Because Ray (his best friends know his real name is Ray [ED: Pemulis has not actually ever met him though he did reply to one of his e-mails once]) is an international jet-setter who lives in Paris in a huge apartment across the river from the Notre Dame cathedral and makes (presumably) millions of Euros from his DC Rainmaker blog the 5 items in these weekly features are things along the lines of "Flew to Majorca", "Dined at a 3-Michelin-Starred Restaurant", and "Spent half the weekend skiing in St. Moritz followed by a quick flight down to the Seychelles". Interestingly (and this is true) he was until recently a colleague of mine (only in that we worked at the same multinational corporation) but he quit about a year ago because somehow I guess he was making more or "enough" from being a blogging superstar. Something to aspire to, I suppose. But anyways, it would be nice if Pemulis could have such a feature but some problems with that idea include (1) he would have to write a post every week instead of every month or so which has been the standard lately; (2) he would have to somehow find 5 things to do every weekend; and, most difficult of all probably, (3) they would have to be somewhat interesting. He could definitely pull off a feature called something like "The 5 Times I took Helga to the Doctor this Weekend" except that the Doctor's not there on the weekend but 5 times every two days is about the average lately. Another possible feature might be "Five Times that Helga Woke me Up Last Night" but it would be really difficult to choose the five to highlight each time. For now, Pemulis will stick to his ad hoc approach to posts and just hope that somehow the frequency and interestingness of the posts will start to increase.

2. Pemulis heard somewhere along the way that grown-ups typically get mortgages to buy houses/flats rather than continually giving most of their pay-cheque away to evil landlords. He's also pretty sure that he's in the category of "grown-up" due to all the signs pointing to same (e.g. bad back, lack of hair on head, not managing to do 5 things on a weekend that one might tell others about, thinking that he should buy an apartment one day but not being able to afford it, wishing he could yell at kids to get off of his lawn but not having a lawn, etc.). Unfortunately while he is widely regarded and known as the world's foremost deception expert, that skill doesn't seem to translate (yet) to Dollars and/or Euros.

3. Helga has missed 2 weeks straight of Krippe and counting. She learned how to say her name though -- which is good -- but being away so long the only German word she can say is... her name. Nevertheless, even if she had been healthy and been going to Krippe, for some entirely inexplicable reason the teachers speak English to her even though we've told them about 75,000 times to speak German to her and treat her like all the other kids. Our next plan is to try reverse-psychology. Pemulis has a theory that since the teachers spend so much of their lives surrounded by very tiny children who (he's heard) are very susceptible indeed to good old fashioned reverse-psychology, maybe it's been ingrained in them as some kind of norm and the way to get them to speak German to Helga is to tell them not to. It might be worth a try.

4. Pemulis signed a contract a few months ago to write a book (not an interesting book -- a computer book) and the draft is due in exactly 10 days. It's with a few other co-authors though and he is only responsible for two chapters, but each chapter is meant to be around 40--60 pages each. Normally people probably would have started such a thing by now, and if they were so crazy to have not started at all then any tiny moment that they might scrounge up along the way they would probably use to devote to chapter writing in any way, shape, or form that they could, and they would most definitely not be using a few free moments in the evening when they really should be sleeping to write some silly blog post instead of working on the chapter. But no one ever accused Pemulis of being normal people.

5. Tomorrow (actually in about an hour) is Joelle's really-old-th birthday. She is turning really old and if Pemulis were paid what he's worth and deserves then Joelle would be getting a brand new house and an Aston Martin but since he's not paid either what he's worth or what he deserves then she'll be getting whatever he can find in the basement when him and Helga head down first thing in the morning before Joelle wakes up. But if he wants to do that he had better get to bed ASAP or his entire plan will be foiled.

6. Pemulis is now going to bed.

A taste of spring

Helvetica is a fine font, wouldn't you say? It's so fine, in fact, that I make use of it in nearly every post on this here web log. Don't get too caught up on it, though, or you might end up as a person who loves Helvetica so much that they make a movie about it. That movie -- called Helvetica, of course -- was released in 2007 and apparently (I haven't seen it) is so good that it currently has a Tomatometer score of 88% (!) on Rotten Tomatoes. The mind boggles, does it not? But before you go falling too in love with this font, let me note one important thing: if you're reading this on a stock (i.e. no specially purchased additional licensed fonts pack installed) Windows machine, you're probably defaulting to the knock-off and far-inferior (and super lame) Arial. If you're on a Mac, however, and (I think) an iPhone or iPad, you're most likely experiencing this drivel in a beautifully flowing sans-serif wonderland of Helvetica. But enough about that and let's talk about the weather.

Today we had our first real taste of Bavarian spring for 2017. In fact, the mercury reached all the way up to 20 degrees Celsius at one point in the early afternoon. Not bad for February 23rd. I sincerely hope it's a preview of what is soon to come. Especially as we have some nice trips lined up in the pipeline for the coming months. In April we will spend a week in the northern Italian autonomous province of Südtirol. On the off-chance that Helga isn't super sick and we are forced to cancel the whole thing, we will experience mountain relaxation at its not-finest because Helga wouldn't allow that. Hopefully we'll have some nice weather though. Immediately upon our return I will head to the sunny South coast of France and spend a week on the Côte d'Azur as we once-upon-a-time often did back in the early 2010's. First I will be based in the resort town of Toulon where I will mix and mingle with the deep learning celebrities of 2017 at the International Conference on Learning Representations. I'll then most likely drift East-ward to visit friends in Antibes. If all goes according to plan, Joelle and Helga will join at this point for a family vacation.

What happens between then and late August is anyone's guess, but everyone knows that at some point during those intervening months we will have to find a way to do a little bit (actually a lot) of bicycling so that we don't embarrass ourselves too profoundly when we get to Copenhagen. I've heard rumours now that not only has Thony been performing daily 5AM trail runs around the shores of the Gothenburg peninsula, but he's also used his ill-gotten lawyer money to purchase carbon wheels (tubulars no doubt) and a Garmin Vector pedal-based power meter is on the way. He is playing a strong game of intimidation and at this point is winning. But we are early yet!

I better get to bed now. It's late and tomorrow morning Helga auditions for the Munich symphony baby orchestra. Cross your fingers for her!

Five years ago today...

Pemulis and Joelle flew from the world's least skiable location SW Ontario to Lyon to start a new life as ski instructors in the Alps. Since it turned out that neither of them could ski, instead Pemulis started a career as a machine learning researcher (way less cool than ski instructor and way less ski-bunnies involved but whatever) at XRCE in Grenoble in the heart of the Alps. Living within 50 km of many of the Tour de France's most famous mountain climbs, including less than 10 minutes away from the start of the climb to Lans-en-Vercors, Joelle took up road cycling in a serious way. She ascended the Alpe d'Huez on multiple occasions and performed serious training on said mountains that helped lead her (along with many miles ran along the banks of the river Isère and 1 or 2 swims at the Meylan pool) to an 11.5 hour Ironman in the inaugural Ironman Kalmar in Sweden. Pemulis just kind of hung out in a château and learned to not only function but thrive as an amateur ping pong enthusiast and wine connoisseur. After 1.5 years had passed and there were no more opponents for Pemulis to destroy in table tennis, the two decided to keep their European / Alp ski dream alive. While they hadn't even attempted to go skiing a single time in the previous eighteen months despite living at what is the centre of basically the world of both modern and historical downhill skiing, and within one-hour driving distance from what are widely acknowledged as the world's premiere ski resorts including les Deux Alpes, Alpe d'Huez, and others, their dream of having at least some tangential connection to the world of Alpine skiing remained alive; they decided that they were just too close to the action in Grenoble and that maybe being fairly close to the Alps but not directly in them could possibly help the situation. So, they picked up shop and moved down the road to Munich. Munich seemed ideal because it's about an hour's drive or train ride from world-class skiing in the Alps, but you're not right there in the thick of things in a city that just entirely revolves around skiing. This seemed to be the solution they were after. 3.5 years quickly went by, however, and along the way they added a third body to their small family which made getting out to the ski hill all the more complicated. Nevertheless, they didn't give up hope; a baby girl might be just what they need to finally have that true connection to Alpine skiing as they could start her off right -- you know, learning to ski before even learning to walk like all the greats claim to have done. Hold that thought because after these five years, an opportunity presented itself that would bring the protagonists back from whence they came to the Great White North. They deliberated this chance deeply and extensively and examined at great detail the idea that since they still hadn't become world-champion skiers despite living sort-of close to the Alps then it seemed clear that the only solution was to live really far from them. But in the end, they decided to stay for now because little Helga still can't walk on this five-year-to-the-day after flying to Lyon and therefore there's still a chance for her to learn to ski first.

Thirty six years of Albatross

Ah! Well a-day! What evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the albatross
About my neck was hung.

The Brazilians believe that one can imagine his life only as far as the years that he has lived. At this time, looking out to his thirty-sixth year, Pemulis saw little. In fact, he refused to even look. Most young men do, and therefore see, the same. Here and now, and even next, they embrace, but many years later, at the apogee of his younger self's vision of time, Pemulis not only looks, but seeks fervently, though with apprehension and uneasiness, the infinite paths of a life tree before him. Years earlier, the turns, left or right down the infinite tree, held a far lighter weight; the chosen path opened further routes, and those routes could always re-connect with that which might have unfurled but for an earlier decision. The chosen passage now is heavy and rather than expanding the tree below, each choice leads to a pruning of the tree's roots, and unchosen pathways disappear forever. The ultimate fate of the infinite tree leads inexorably towards its beginning; the big crunch is on the horizon. No longer does the infinite tree expand, but it begins to contract.

And so, rather than choosing the optimal path (which alas is intractable), Pemulis seems to seek the untenable: forgo the stability of a tree with a strong base (for the correct path leads to strong roots); forgo the search for the ideal choices at every step; forgo homo economicus (for he is not him). Rather, take actions that lead to the fewest paths being pruned. Is it a harder problem? Why seek comfort only to flee its eventual embrace? The search for the true path is age-old: to only want what you cannot have. This is a Taleb Distribution. We can take it directly from the definition: "there is a high probability of a small gain, and a small probability of a very large loss, which more than outweighs the gains. In these situations the expected value is very much less than zero, but this fact is camouflaged by the appearance of low risk and steady returns". Vorsicht, Pemulis, for you know not what you do.

It's Friday!

There are about five and a half hours left in the Obama presidency and here we are in the coldest few weeks experienced in Bavaria for at least the previous five years. It's an angst-inducing time. Nevertheless, I saw the sun shine at lunchtime today and Nate Silver assures me that statistically, parties steadily lose power in the other branches of government when they have the White House. Also, there is the 25th Amendment.

But enough about U.S. politics! Today is January 20th, 2017, meaning we are 212 days, or exactly 7 months, to IM Copenhagen! Sandi and I haven't started our "training regime" yet but hopefully we will start this weekend. We got a wake-up call when our friend Thony's dad was in Munich this week and stopped by for a dinner of home-made pizza. Thony has been in Thailand for the last 4 weeks and it was reported by his dad that Thony has been running every day very early in the morning before the heat of the day settles in and he can start his biking exercise. Scary stuff.

This weekend we will do 3 runs each (at least that's the plan). We will also try to make it to the swimming pool for some family swimming to make sure that Hannah remembers how. The plan is also to fit in at least one indoor cycling session on the Electronic Trainer in ERG mode (just think back to what happened last January to the tune of "País Tropical") and maybe we will buy some fancy cheese at the Eataly market. Yes, I know! We live such compelling lives!

If you happen to be in Western Europe this weekend, drop by for a coffee. We will be drinking them at most hours of the day on both Saturday and Sunday so your chances of arriving around coffee time are high. And even if we're not there when you arrive because we're out running, at the pool, or buying our Italian products, just wait a few minutes. We'll be back soon because Hannah will have to nap.

See you soon.

Modern work

There are around 76,412,583,910 (close to 77-billion, basically) high-level themes relating to, centered around, and underpinning the modern economic and political system and how labor/work is understood within that system, where the neo-liberal version of Western liberal capitalism that started to emerge as the de facto approach to corporate and government policy some time in the 1990's has failed and has directly led us to the majority of the current problems that we face today which include but are not limited to the growth of right-wing populism and early stages of fascism, nationalism, racism as a government policy, entire demographics being left out of the workforce, emotional disconnection from society, depression, reversal of global collaboration, etc, etc, etc, but today I just want to talk about two of these essentially infinite themes: (1) the idea that if you don't "love" what you do (with respect to work) then you should find a different job (eventually everyone who loves garbage collection and everyone who loves cleaning toilets will find their dream job unless robots take over all that); and (2) the fetishization of work and the idea that if you're not working on something "significant" then why are you working on it at all.

Both have been heavily pushed through the awful medium known as TED talks. If you don't know what a TED talk is then I envy you and your life is actually probably pretty good and maybe you shouldn't be reading this downer of a blog post mostly because it might lead you to become curious about what exactly these "TED talks" are and you might then go actually watch one of them and then you'll have wasted a whole bunch of your time (because [spoiler alert]: they're awful). But if you're all too familiar with TED talks and your over-eager colleagues are sharing them with you every other hour with assurances that this one on how you've been improperly tying your shoelaces your whole life (I have!? DISASTER!) or that this life hack will save you thousands of dollars (hint to the millionaires in the audience: it's a "thrift shop" [but they actually know about it now thanks to Macklemore]) or (maybe the worst of all) the twelve-year-old douche-bag who made an "app" in the "app store" and was home-schooled and therefore obviously the school system has failed us all and if we were all home-schooled we could all be pretentious shits making apps in the app store and wouldn't we be so successful and outside-the-box and progressive and maybe one day Google will buy our company and then we'll be rich too and because we made an app in the app store our opinion will all of a sudden become important.

TED talks are not the topic of this post (but are highly related to it) but just one more thing (well two actually): have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? It is "a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is". This is exactly what TED talks help to perpetuate (among other nasty things like spreading the fake news about "power poses" and then that will make you barf [literally]). Because I watched a 3-minute video on quantum physics I now am fully qualified at discussing why isn't it crazy that gravity isn't even explained by quantum physics??? OMG here is what I think the answer to that is! (you have added zero to the conversation). TED talks are hmm... what's the right metaphor?... they are the FitBits of pop-intellectualism. Everyone has a FitBit and they are deluded into thinking that if they hit their special goal that they will turn into a sculpted supermodel. Ok maybe a bad analogy, but having a shallow piece of information on a complex subject is generally more destructive than the other way around (especially when that shallow piece of information is used to try to start a conversation on which said person knows nothing about.. which would be fine except that they believe they have the background to make outrageous ignorant commentary upon said subject). Oh right, the second thing: most of these TED talks take an implicit view on both of the topics I said I would cover today -- namely, loving what you do, and the festishization of work.

The first view is repeated ad nauseam, especially in the technology / Silicon Valley / computer sector, and it's not exactly clear where it started, but a fairly representative and somewhat "famous" example is from Steve Jobs's Stanford commencement address in 2005:

"You’ve got to find what you love [...] Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle…"

Easy if you're a multi-billionaire who is in the 0.000000001% of people who have the skills, tenacity, strange interests (etc) that happen to fit what is currently wanted by the world economy/society/*, but how can anyone honestly argue that everyone will be able to find a job that they "love". For the time being, we still need parking lot attendants, security guards, waste processing engineers (garbagemen), janitors, secretaries, grocery store check-out people, retailers (i.e. the people who sell you your clothes at the Gap or whatever), accountants (OK I admit there are some really weird people out there who might like this), bus drivers, waiters, cake decorators, administrative assistants, Uber drivers (see below), Amazon shipping workers (I mean people that go through the warehouse, find the book, and put it in the package -- the robots can't fully do it by themselves yet), mechanics, dentists (though they are always odd), etc. If you really love something you shouldn't have to get paid to do it, right? I can't imagine any of these people doing any of the above jobs for free (well, maybe the really weird dentists). Deluding people into thinking that everyone is doing something (as a job) that they love and if you're not amongst them there's something wrong with you is a recipe for mass depression in a society. And one of the things that I really hate about this is that I think people convince themselves that they LOVE their job and get all annoying about it and then an expectation perpetuates that you should totally just think about your job all the time and since you love it anyways you should be doing it all the time all weekend long and why would you ever take any vacation because you're taking time away from something you love so much. Which leads to the feishization of work...

The erroneous belief that everyone should LOVE what they do and therefore you're not really "ever working a day in your life" means that companies shouldn't even have to pay us all that much for doing work that benefits the very few corporate executives and shareholders of the company because they are making it possible for you to "do your best work!!!". Then that's tied to the idea that since you love it so much and it's so exciting and these are such exciting times you should just always be working. Let's key-in, actually, on that important point just mentioned that is now pushed heavily by (mainly) tech industry corporations: that these are such exciting times. This is a viewpoint expounded by Silicon Valley elites / tech "apologists" (though no one seems to be forcing them to apologize so that's probably not the right label) and is represented in this widely-shared (almost exclusively shared in a positive light) quote by Tom Goodwin (not the former professional baseball player but the tech/media something-or-other over-confident smarter-than-all "head of innovation" somewhere):

"Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening."

The part that's especially galling is the presumptive conclusion that follows the premises: "something interesting is happening". Indeed, something terrible. Somehow these frighteningly brilliant marketing / Silicon Valley people have convinced us that this is exciting and the "democratization" of the every industry from media to service to retail. Here is an open secret that I will share with you: no one is getting rich driving an Uber (besides Uber). Facebook is perpetuating fake news and learning everything about you that advertising executives 20 years ago would have had fantasies about (and you're doing it for free), and if Airbnb puts the hotels out of business then we're all screwed (for obvious reasons but in case they aren't as obvious as I think they are here are some examples: who regulates for safety? what happens when there's a fire in your apartment? what happens when the tenants have a party and burn the place down? who will you talk to when you arrive at an airbnb and it actually doesn't exist? etc.).

I hear farming can be rewarding...