Personal – Page 18 – Walking Contradiction

The Second Century

No, I’m not talking about history – this is about my cycling ride on Saturday. I participated in the 2016 Tour de Cure San Antonio, and completed the 103-mile course. I’ve only ridden a century (a 100-mile ride) once before, and my attempts at doing another were thwarted twice: once, a year later, when the entire ride was washed out by heavy thunderstorms, and then again at last year’s Tour de Cure, when they closed the century course early due to thunderstorms.

Start of ride — Lining up for the start of the ride (at 7am)!

Well, this year’s ride had its share of thunderstorms, too, but fortunately they were at the end. The day started off overcast and threatening-looking, but nothing came of all those clouds. About 30 miles into the ride the sun burst through, and I was hoping that it would stick around for a while. However, we only got to enjoy the sunshine for an hour or so until the clouds returned. It kept looking darker and darker as the ride progressed, and then at the rest stop at mile 80 there were event officials warning that a little ways up the road it was already raining heavily. They had vehicles that would shuttle you and your bike to the finish line if you didn’t want to ride through the storm, but that wasn’t what I had set out to do. What’s a little water, anyway?

To be honest, I was feeling pretty drained after 80 miles. When you sweat while cycling, the breeze against you dries it quickly, so after a few hours it feels like a salty crust. My leg muscles also felt like they had begun to run out of energy. But I set out to continue the ride anyway, and sure enough, about a mile later the skies opened up. Within minutes I was soaked from my helmet to my shoes. Oddly enough, though, it was actually re-invigorating! And once you’re wet, more rain isn’t getting you any wetter, so I rode on. The loud cracks of thunder sounded great, like music for a film I was starring in. Yeah, it felt pretty dramatic!

So I made it to the finish. The first time I did a century I was struggling – hard. I wasn’t even running on fumes then; hell, I would have loved to have had some fumes at that point. I had to stop several times in that last 30 mile loop to regain enough strength to keep going. So completing that ride was a matter of sheer will power. This year it was different: sure, I was tired during the ride, and a bit stiff afterwards, but when I got within a few miles of the finish, I found another gear and sprinted my way in.

Crossing the finish line after 103 miles!

I think that there were several differences this year. I had trained much better this time, so my legs were better able to keep going for the distance. It was also much cooler, with temperatures in the 70s (instead of around 90F). And the rain, while making some aspects uncomfortable, certainly helped to refresh me. Finally, the course this year didn’t have very many severe hills. It had lots of climb, but nothing compared to the earlier course, which featured several killer hills.

posing with medal — Posing with my medal after finishing the ride, soaking wet!

There are three sets of people I want to thank: first, the American Diabetes Association, for organizing this event and making it run so smoothly – you’re really doing great work! Second, to the members of the ProFox online community for generously donating to support me. Together we raised $500! And finally, of course, to my wonderful wife Linda, who encouraged me every step of the way, and even drove back home to get my water bottles that I had forgotten. Hey, it was 6 in the morning, and my brain hadn’t caffeinated enough yet!

Linda and Ed — Linda and I, just before the start of the ride

Bias is Bias, Inadvertant or Not

I recently read this tweet storm by Matt Joseph (@_mattjoseph) that made me think. Go ahead, read it first. Read all 30 of his tweets so that you understand his point.

Whether you like to admit it or not, bias is real, and the targets of negative bias end up having to work much, much harder to overcome that bias than those for whom the bias is positive. Want an example? In the classical music world, musicians would audition to fill openings in an orchestra. For such auditions the musical director and possibly one or two other senior musicians who would act as judges. They would listen to each candidate perform a piece of music so that their musical abilities could be rated, and the highest rated musicians would get the job. Pretty straightforward. Traditionally (that is, through 1970) women only made up 5% or so of most orchestras. Now it can be assumed that a musical director would want the best musicians in their orchestra, so they would not have a reason to select mostly men if women played as well. So it was commonly assumed that playing music was both artistic and athletic, and that this athletic component that gave men the edge.

However, starting in the 1970s, auditions were switched to be done blindly: the musicians performed behind a screen, and the judges only had a number to refer to them.

blind_audition Credit: old.post-gazette.com

It should not shock you that with this change, the percentage of women in orchestras began climbing, reaching 20% by the 1990s. Given the low turnover of orchestras, this is a huge difference! There are only 2 possible explanations for such a rapid, radical change. One is that women were suddenly getting better at playing music, though there is no evidence of any additional intense training programs for female musicians at that time.

So the second, and obvious, explanation is that prior to the blind auditions, the bias of the judges influenced what they heard, and as a result, women would be scored lower. Put another way, for a woman to make it into an orchestra, she had to be much more talented than a man in order to overcome that bias and get a similar score.

That, in essence, is the point Matt was making about the state of funding for tech companies: people of color, like him,

“…had to overcome things that others in the exact same position didn’t have to. That means with equal conditions, we’d be much further.”

The flip side to this is that, given two people of equal talent, you can expect that the person subjected to these kinds of negative biases will have less to show, in terms of any measures that may be used as “objective” criteria. This includes things like grades and SAT scores for kids applying to colleges. The attempt to correct for this bias is commonly referred to as “Affirmative Action”. If you recognize that bias exists, you understand why programs like this are important. Of course, it would be better to eliminate bias altogether, right? Yeah, and be sure to tell me when someone figures out how to do that. I don’t believe it’s possible, given the tribal nature in which humans evolved. This is why devices such as the blind audition are needed, and, if that’s not possible, applying a corrective factor to compensate.

Still not convinced that steps like Affirmative Action are correct? Then please explain why minorities such as blacks and Latinos score lower on average than whites. I see only two explanations: 1) they face many more hurdles in the education system, such as poorer facilities and support systems, that prevent them from progressing as strongly, or 2) they are inherently not as smart as whites. I’m sure that if you thought that option 2 is even possible, you wouldn’t be the type of person inclined to read this far. The proof is in the stats: if a group makes up N% of the population overall, but less than N% in some selected group, you’d better be able to identify an objective reason for this difference, or you’ve got to assume bias is influencing these numbers. And it isn’t something to be ashamed of or try to deny: we all have biases that we aren’t aware of, so it simply makes sense to admit that this is the case, and try to find a way to address it to make things level.

And don’t for a moment think that this is an altruistic, touchy-feely thing to help assuage white guilt. It means that talented people who were previously overlooked will now have a better chance of contributing, making things better for all. Why wouldn’t you want the best people working for you?

Behavior Modification

Over the weekend I saw a retweet from my friend Niki Acosta (@nikiacosta) which stated:

Destroy the idea that men should respect women because we are their daughters, mothers, and sisters. Reinforce the idea that men should respect women because we are people.

While I certainly agree with the latter notion, I don’t think that the former is very wise. We have a problem with men who treat women as nothing more than objects, and that translates into all kinds of hostile and dangerous behavior. First and foremost should be reducing the amount, and therefore the number of victims, of that behavior. So what is really needed is a way to modify their behavior; after that’s done we can think about enlightenment of their backwards minds, but until then, that’s a far-off luxury.

Men who exhibit these behaviors in general do not see women as people, so trying to appeal to them on this will have no effect. These men are brought up in environments where women are not seen as equal. Most come from the world of “traditional” marriage, where a woman was property to be exchanged among men in different families. They exist for men’s sexual pleasure, to bear offspring, and to do the “women’s work” of the home. In that world, women are servants. The notion that a woman is just as much a person as they are, and deserves equal respect, would seem ludicrous to them. But it is likely that they have developed some bonds with female members of their family, and so they can understand that if someone were to disrespect their mother, or their sister, they would feel that that action was wrong, and it’s possible that they might make the relatively small mental leap to seeing that the “objects” they want are indeed someone else’s mother or sister or daughter. It might cause them to think twice about acting on their thoughts.

As the saying goes, Perfect is the Enemy of the Good. It would be absolutely wonderful if we could raise the social awareness of everyone so that people treat each other well simply because of our respective personhoods, but if you strive for that, you’ll miss opportunities to make some incremental changes in the world. Let’s focus on improving the behavior of these problematic men before we worry about raising their level of consciousness.

Comments

There is an electric outlet on one of the walls of our house that is located abnormally high on the wall. Maybe the previous owners had a table or something, and placed the outlet at that height because it was more convenient. In any case, it wasn’t where we needed it, and it simply looked odd where it was. Since I am in the middle of fixing up this room, I decided to lower it to a height consistent with the other outlets in the house. That should be a simple enough task, as I’ve done similar things many times before. I started cutting away the drywall below the outlet at the desired height, and continued upward. The saw kept hitting a solid surface a little bit behind the drywall, so I gently continued up to the existing outlet, and then removed the piece of drywall.

What I found was completely unexpected: behind this sheet of drywall was what had previously been the exterior wall of the house! This room was a later addition, and instead of removing the old wall, they just nailed some drywall on top of it!

hidden old exterior wall. — Note the white shingles behind the drywall!

Now I understand why the outlet was at this peculiar height: the previous owners had opened up one row of shingles on the old wall, and simply placed the outlet there. Now, of course, moving it will require quite a bit more work.

This is a great example of where you should liberally comment your code: whenever you write a work-around, or something that would normally not be needed, in order to handle a particular odd situation. This way, when later on someone else owns the code and wants to “clean things up”, they’ll know ahead of time that there is a reason you wrote things in what seems to be a very odd way. This has two benefits: 1) they won’t look at your code and think that you were an idiot for doing that, and 2) they’ll be better able to estimate the time required to change it, since they’ll at least have a clue about the hidden shingles lurking behind the code.

Tour de Cure 2015

Yesterday was the 2015 Tour de Cure San Antonio, a cycling event to help raise money to find a cure for diabetes. This was the third time I’ve ridden it, and the first time I felt in good enough shape to attempt the century course (century = 100 miles). In order to fit in such a long ride, we arrived at the site at 6am! Note: I’m not one of those crazy people who think this is a good time to be doing anything other than drinking coffee.

We were scheduled to start at 6:30, so we all lined up at the starting line before then. But the event organizers thought that it would be a wonderful idea to talk to the riders about all the wonderful things we were helping to accomplish by raising the funds that we did, so they kept us waiting until just before 7:00, straddling our bikes. I was ready to go a half hour earlier, and instead of starting the ride out ready to conquer the world, I started the ride feeling kind of crabby. All the rides do this to some degree, but keeping us waiting for over 30 minutes was uncalled for.

The weather was the big question mark, with rain and thunderstorms moving across the region. And, of course, we didn’t escape them! It started around mile 25, and continued for the next 10 miles or so. Lightning, rain, big wind gusts (straight into our face, of course!), but I kept going, knowing that there was a cutoff time for the century: if you didn’t reach the point where the 100 and 65 mile routes diverged by 11am, you wouldn’t be allowed to do the century, because you wouldn’t finish in time. Here’s a shot of the rest stop right after the rain stopped.

Rest Stop #3 — After riding through the storm – soaked!

You really can’t see how soaked everyone is, but trust me, my gloves and socks were pretty soggy! You can, however, see the patches of blue sky just beginning to break through. The rest of the ride was dry, which was a relief.

I got to the rest stop located 3 miles before the point where the routes split a few minutes after 10am, so I was happy that I made the effort to ride through the bad weather. I’ve only done a full century once before, and it was really important to me to not have that be a one-time event. I headed out from that rest stop, and continued down the road. If you haven’t done a ride like this, they give you a map of the route ahead of time, but most of the roads are in pretty remote areas where you don’t know the roads, so you navigate with the help of signs put up on the side of the road by the event organizers. They have each route marked with a different color, so where the routes diverge is easy to see. So I rode ahead with some others who were also doing the century, but a few miles later we came upon a sign that only listed the 65-mile route; there was no mention of the 100! We stopped, thinking that we must have missed the sign; perhaps it had blown over in the storm, and we all didn’t see it. Just then a marshall drove up (the routes are patrolled by ride marshalls, who make sure that riders are safe), so we stopped him to ask about the 100 mile route. He checked it out on the radio, and then told us that we should go to the next rest stop, where the routes will diverge. Well, I got to that stop, and asked the people there, and they told us that they had pulled the direction signs for the century an hour earlier than planned! I was furious! All of the work I had put in to training for this ride, and all of the discomfort of riding through the thunderstorm so I could make the cutoff, and they took that away from me and many other riders for no reason.

So I took out my phone, pulled up the century route PDF, and tried to plot a path to go to one of the rest stops on that route. I couldn’t backtrack to find the turnoff intersection, because even if I had, I would have been much too late at this point. So I knew I wouldn’t be able to do the full century, but at least I’d get as close as I could. So Google Maps plotted a route, and I took off, ignoring the signs for the 65 mile route, and creating my own.

The only problem was that Google Maps thinks that there are a bunch of roads in that area that simply don’t exist. I went up and down the roads it suggested, until I finally gave up and figured I had better head back to the finish of the ride. Here’s one example: note that the map in the lower left corner shows a road, but what is actually there is a driveway made of sand that dead-ends at someone’s house. The map shows it continuing all the way through. And yes, I plan on letting the fine folks at Google Maps know about this problem.

So I rode back to the highway, and continued west until I hit the return path for the century route. I followed that back to the finish, with a total of 81 miles on the day (here’s the RunKeeper record of my ride). And waiting for me at the end was my wonderful woman Linda, who has done so much to support me for this ride. It was great to see her smiling face!

So while I didn’t get to complete another century, I did have an unusually adventurous ride. I do hope that the organizers learn from this event, because I would really like to do it again next year, and it is for a very good cause. If you’re interested in donating, they are still accepting donations for this event for the next few weeks, so follow this link and give what you can.