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Showing posts with label bananas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bananas. Show all posts

Saturday, 15 November 2014

Running Super food

I am sure FraidyKat has posted this before but seriously, a pre-run banana is a wonderful thing.

I just had an awesome 5 miler!
I must try the same formula because it really worked - first start with a light meal 1 to 1 1/2 hours before the run (about 300 calories light), then eat one banana with 4 capsules of reflex thermofusion about 1/2 hour before the run.
Finally, find a banging running sound track and a beautiful setting to run in...
Result: Awesome run

When road running the best you can look forward to for interest is the odd roadkill pheasant and perhaps a toot from a passing van, but if you get off the road you can find some fantastic scenery.
Today I ran along the Grand Union Canal, saying hello to passing narrowboaters and watching a Heron fly from the path and skim across the water. Much better than road running.

Of course there is the question of what lurks beneath the surface of the water. Today it was calm, too calm, and the fog had not lifted all day. At first I thought perhaps Nessie was coming south for winter but now I wonder if we have not become part of the territory of a water dragon. If we have there is nothing to fear, they feast on fish. Perhaps if I'm lucky I'll see it, but they hide in the mist and the fog, and you have to be really quiet...

FraidyKat Runs - on bananas

Friday, 6 June 2014

Confused

Yesterday I had a really good run. 2 miles (around the village and back) and it felt good, tiring but good.
I ate half a banana just before going and it really made a difference. Forget expensive energy drinks, it worked a treat, I felt like I had energy the whole way round.

I was confused by my run through. Like I said, it felt good, but according to my running app I was all over the place for speed. I'm hardly a fast runner, a sedate 5mph is good for me - nature made me a slow jogger, I get there eventually but that's all you can say really - but yesterday I was anywhere from 3.5 to 6mph, that's just silly.
I can't even blame it on the hills. The speed chart shows me up and down in speed no matter what the incline. I can't blame the music either, the tempo of the tracks doesn't match. I must have been really distracted by something.

For some of the route I was contemplating a plot line for a new story (too early for spoilers just yet), for the rest I was having trouble navigating my way through the news headline I saw about how it won't long before we have start worrying about the rights of robots.
We can't even get humans rights figured, how can we possibly work out the rights of artificial intelligence?
Are we going to end up with retirement homes for smart phones? Geek Nurses whose job it is to play games on them to stop them suffering from lack of use when their cruel owners disgard them for the latest model?
It reminded me of the episode of Red Dwarf, The Last Day, where they get round this by programming their robots to believe in Android Heaven, "So they don't get stroppy when it comes to turn off time".
Then there is the wisdom of Isaac Asimov (bow down before the Robotics Guru who brought us the Three Laws), who devoted a huge amount of time to this very problem.
But as a species who can't figure out what rights we have and what rights the other indigenous life have it seems rather presumptuous of us to go ahead with trying to create artificial life that will most likely be abused for a very long time before our laws catch up enough to provide them with protection. - You only have to see how UK laws have failed so spectacularly to keep up with technology thus far to figure that out.

All in all it's an extremely difficult and delicate problem, not one that can be solved during a 2 mile run, not even an extremely slow run.
I think this is ultra marathon territory and I have a really long way to go before I can manage that.


Is the question of robot rights premature or not? Are we really still trying to create independently functioning androids or has someone already done it and is keeping it really quiet? Think about it, all those people who survive when they really should have died, the ones who come out of such nasty accidents without a scratch, are we really supposed to believe they are just lucky humans? Or are they the work of a genius? Are they artificial life-forms hiding from view until we have grown up enough exist with them?


FraidyKat Runs - from non-3 laws robots