1,032 Dutch runners finished the NYC marathon yesterday, out of 34,166 total finishers. Running the New York Marathon has become such a cliche of the 40-year old non-runner crowd, that I always suspected our Dutch contingent would perform poorly compared to the rest. I was wrong.

This is the distribution of (total time)/(2*halfway-time). If you run a flat pace, this number comes out one. People that are ill-prepared for the marathon would score well above one, as they typically crash in the second half of the race. The blue line is for all participants, the yellow line for the Dutch. Notice: they are nearly the same! As it turns out, 27.1% of the Dutch runs a negative split (value smaller than one) versus 28% of all runners. Average Dutch time is 4:28:06, versus 4:36:46 for the entire field.

posted at: 05:23 | path: /en/running | permanent link

What started off as a cloudy night turned into a wonderful spectacle: 15 minutes before totality, the last clouds disappeared while the moon turned red.

posted at: 17:22 | path: /en/pictures | permanent link

Wired heeft een special over Philip K. Dick, naar aanleiding van een nieuwe film op basis van zijn werk (komt helaas pas op 4 maart in Nederland uit). Uiteraard zijn de boeken beter; bij De Slegte kun je vaak nog (voor weinig) Nederlandse vertalingen uit de jaren 60 en 70 kopen. Die zijn de moeite zeer waard (bedenk bij de laatste link dat Tom Cruise in de film de rol van Anderton speelt).

posted at: 04:31 | path: /nl/dingen | permanent link