My Track Record

The woman on my TV screen looked very familiar. Who was that pregnant schoolteacher leading her students through the walk-through model of the human heart in this 2006 episode (#217, "All In") of House? Could it be my old Williams College dorm-mate Purva Bedi?

One of my most vivid memories from my junior year in college is of Purva studying synaptic transmission in the hallway of Garfield House. She was taking introductory neuroscience at the time, as I was, but her theatre background was never kept hidden for long. In reviewing the process of how neurons communicate with each other, she first adopted the "persona" of the calcium ions entering the axon terminus through voltage-gated channels, then became the neurotransmitter molecules released from the synaptic vesicles, diffusing across the synaptic cleft, and binding to receptors in the postsynaptic membrane. She performed this micro-scale dance routine with considerable energy and utter conviction.

From my condescending biology-major perspective, I thought Purva's antics were hilarious. I didn't exclaim, "Hey, look at the thespian trying to learn science!" but that's what I was thinking. And yet, when the semester ended, Purva had earned an A+ in the course and I had barely gotten an A.

I'm happy to report that Purva is now a successful actress, with a lot on her resume besides that House appearance, including an upcoming role as the star of When Kiran Met Karen. If her acting luck ever runs out, though, I bet she'd make a great neuroscientist.

Posted by crowther at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A recent blog entry by Brian Hayes, one of my favorite science writers, discusses the age-old ritual of dividing a group of kids into two teams:

The simplest algorithm has two captains, A and B, who take turns choosing players until everyone is assigned to one team or the other. Call this the ABAB algorithm. Donald B. Aulenbach suggested a very easy modification that produces more closely matched teams. Aulenbach’s proposal is the ABBA algorithm, where A gets the first pick in the first round but B goes first in the second round, and they continue alternating in successive rounds. (Another way of describing the same process is that A begins with a single turn and thereafter both captains take two turns in a row.)

Hayes then shows some simulation results confirming that the ABBA algorithm does indeed divide up the players more evenly than ABAB. He concludes,

Going back to my own childhood, I don’t think the kids in my neighborhood ever discovered the ABBA algorithm. We did recognize the inherent advantage of choosing first, and we compensated by adopting a separate ritual to decide who got the first pick. In baseball, this involved a hand-over-hand struggle for a grip on the bat. Sometimes I think the preliminaries were more fun than the game.

Another interesting mathletics tidbit was buried in a recent University Week article about Generation IX, a documentary on the University of Washington women's volleyball team:

In the documentary, the viewer sees the team statistician toting up every play in practice as well as in games. As one of the players puts it, "If your numbers aren't there, you know you're not going to start." The women say they like this objective system, because nobody can say, "Oh, it's because [Coach McLaughlin] likes her better."

The idea of determining playing time by objective statistical criteria is appealing to me. Could this approach be used in every sport at every level?

In disciplines like cross-country, of course, assessing performance is extremely straightforward -- you just line up your runners and yell "Go!" and see who gets to the finish line first. But I wonder whether there are adequate statistics for quantifying the success of, say, football linemen or soccer fullbacks. And even if there are, what sample sizes would be necessary to determine that one person is "significantly" better than another? For example, if two shortstops are equivalent defensively, should you play the one with six hits in 20 at-bats over the one with four hits in 19 at-bats? I'm not so sure.

Posted by crowther at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Instead of writing a new blog entry this week, I spent a couple of days answering questions for an interview now posted to eliterunning.com. Thanks to Duncan Larkin for feeding my ego by deciding that I'm interview-worthy, and also for asking some interesting questions (a couple of which originated with Meghan Hicks).

Posted by crowther at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Column inches, that is; there's a profile of me in the March issue of Ultrarunning magazine. Curious about which three historical figures I'd invite to dinner, or which three runners I'd want on my run-across-the-country relay team? Then be sure to pick up a copy at your local ultra-long-distance-freak specialty store. There's a lot of good year-in-review stuff in this issue as well, including the magazine's "Runner of the Year" and "Performance of the Year" voting results, which look pretty reasonable to me overall, considering the difficulty of comparing flat 50Ks with mountainous 100-milers and so forth.

Posted by crowther at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

A few months ago, my wife asked, "You haven't really given anything up since Phil was born, have you?"

Well, yes -- of course I had. Like, um.... I was spending less time with friends, less time in the lab, and less time sleeping. In truth, though, these changes did not amount to a major reallocation of my time. Aside from taking my first clumsy steps into the realm of fatherhood, I was still trying to cram a maximum of personal fulfillment into every day, like a kid during summer vacation.

Given the difficulty of simultaneously being a dad and being a kid, some concession to the first role seemed inevitable. But which delightful hobby could I abandon without lasting regret? After some thought, I realized that I could and should cut back on my duties as webmaster of various small websites.

So long, seattlerunningcompany.com; I’m severing our links. Sorry, pntf.org; we just don’t click anymore. Good luck, cohorealty.com; someone else will soon be the master of your domain.

Cutting back on the website work hasn’t freed up a huge number of hours per month, but it’s a step in the right direction. In February, I finally found the time to complete a few tasks that had been on my to-do list for two months or longer, like sending out Christmas postcards, updating my science song database, and recording a demo of a song I wrote for my friend Do on his 40th birthday (he’s now 41). This catching-up process was also aided by my aunt Carolyn, who treated my wife and Phil to a mini-vacation in Friday Harbor while I stayed behind in Seattle and had the house to myself for three days.

There are many more steps toward full-fledged adulthood that I could take -- such as sanding and painting the exterior of our house, for example. But I don't think I'm mature enough to find the fun in that just yet.

Posted by crowther at 5:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The trip east was a mostly positive experience. As far as I can tell, the job interview went well. At the least, it supplied me with an awesome quote on the relationship between research and teaching in academia. One of the deans with whom I met made the following observation: "People used to regard research and teaching as being in conflict: time spent on one is time unavailable for the other. Now we see research and teaching as being like sin and confession: if you don't commit the act, you have nothing to talk about." Amen!

After the interview, my wife and Phil and I met up with my mother, aunt, and sister (and her boyfriend) in New York City, where activities included sampling Max Brenner's "Chocolate by the Bald Man" and watching a street performer who stomped and twirled to ring the bells on his ankles while playing the fiddle and singing in a surprisingly pretty falsetto voice.

Speaking of physical challenges that wouldn't appeal to most people.... On Sunday I ran the Caumsett Park 50K, which consisted of 11.8 laps of a 2.63-mile paved park loop. I achieved my goals of winning my first USATF championship (worth $150) and breaking the course record of 3:05:59 (worth another $350), but they didn't come nearly as easily as I had hoped, partly due to the wind and the unexpected presence of another good runner, 29-year-old Dave Welsh of Mullica Hill, New Jersey.

Dave and I ran together, more or less, for the first half of the race. By the sixth lap, I wanted to use a port-a-potty, but the first two I ran past were occupied, so I threw in a surge to test Dave's strength prior to relieving myself of the previous day's lunch and the lap-8 lead. After Dave dropped back a bit during my surge, I entered the next port-a-potty confident that I had the race in hand. I overtook Dave again during lap 9, and although I had to work hard to stay on course-record pace after that, the encouragement of the native New Yorkers (with their great accents) mitigated my suffering. I finished in 3:04:35, with Dave 2nd in 3:07:06 and Derek Dippon 3rd in 3:26:25. Triathlete Anna Fyodorova of Brooklyn won the women's race in 3:55:13.

Posted by crowther at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)