Life Pattern

Author: zimage

  • Earth day 2008

    Earth flag

    On April 22 the Earth Day is celebrated with an estimated billion people participating in the activities in thousands of places around the globe. It is a day of awareness and appreciation of our beautiful Spaceship Earth. Earth Day is the only event celebrated simultaneously around the globe by people of all backgrounds, faiths and nationalities.

    In Bulgaria the Earth Day is officialy recognized as of April 22 1992 when president Zhelyu Zhelev affirmed the Earth oath.

    This year the Earth Day agenda here in Sofia includes:

    • 17:30 people gather at the Sofia University for a photography to be taken from the university’s roof
    • 18:30 cycling procession starts from the university along Vasil Levski Blvd, Vitosha Blvd and Graf Ignatiev St, joins the walking procession at the National Theatre “Ivan Vazov” and together they continue towards Borisova garden where there is a concert at the summer stage
    • 20:30 bikers rally at the Ariana pond for a night bike ride (bring head-lights etc.)

    And while we are talking about awareness watch this video:

    Did you manage to count how many passes does the team in white make?

  • 100 km around Vitosha

    On 1st of April my alarm went off to tell me that this year’s tour around Vitosha is just 3 months away and it’s about time to start preparing for the event.

    100 km around Vitosha is a cross-country hiking and biking tour around Vitosha mountain. The official site of the event is http://vitosha100km.hit.bg/. There you can find detailed map of the route, altitude profile, gps tracks (provided by my friend and colleague Nikolay Denev), gallery and the results from the previous year.

    When I’ve heard about the tour for the very first time I found it very appealing so I decided I should take part in it. Unfortunately I didn’t pay attention and missed the 2006 tour. I had to wait for the next one in 2007. I’ve tried to keep sober view on the fact that this is a 100 km tour with quite a few hills to ascend and it ain’t gonna be easy, especially if you try to keep pace. Yet I underestimated the effort.

    Me, my brother Dave and my friend Niki have never taken part in such a race so we decided to ride together and to try to complete it in 8 to 8:30 hours, having in mind that the best times from 2006 were just above 5 hours. It eventually took us 10:30 hours and I personally have never before felt so exhausted in my entire life. I think the main problem was that we didn’t know the terrain well so we tried to keep our average speed too high. Later it turned out (as you can see on the altitude profile) that almost all the climbing is in the first 50 km. Well, if we knew that we would have ridden at a lower speed and would have preserved our glycogen reserves so we wouldn’t have hit the wall so early.

    Here is the distribution of finish times from the 2007 tour:

    Distribution of finish times

    The green point is where we wanted to be, the yellow point is the median result and the red point is were we actually finished.

    Well, we didn’t perform very well but this has only motivated me to try harder this year. Moreover I’ve never been good at endurance sports and I’m very curious as to how far I could go if I try. On the other hand 3 months are not that long period and with my extremely busy schedule I don’t expect miracles.

    Watch this blog for updates 🙂

  • Life Patterns

    While looking for something else in my web server logs I noticed that some of the visitors of this blog came across by searching for phrases like “pattern of life”, “patterns in life”, “what is life pattern” and so on which also happens to be the title of this blog. I’ve chosen this title because one of the main features of the human species is the ability to discover patterns and relationships between events and to use these models and relations to make conclusions and generalizations. That’s what I do as I try to understand things in my journey through life.

    I don’t know what were my readers actually looking for, because the aforementioned expressions may relate to many different things. Nevertheless I looked on teh interwebs to check what’s out there on the subject and that’s what I found:

    There is a mathematical game called Game of Life, Life patterns or sometimes simply Life. It’s one of the best known examples of a cellular automaton. The game was devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. Learn more and try it here.

    Then there is this very interesting Life Patterning Exercise by Results in No Time. It looks like a good way to mind map your life in order to create a more clear picture of who and where you are at the moment.

    According to Monte Zweben there is marketing practice called Life Pattern Marketing. “Life Pattern Marketing is the practice of placing companies’ brand messages on digital screens and billboards that are located where busy people really are. Digital screens are popping up in great places to reach people, carrying short, punchy brand messages that reach potential customers while they pump gasoline in the morning, while they shop for groceries in the afternoon and while they withdraw money from an ATM in the evening. The key is context.”

    On the music front I’m aware of two works that have related titles. One is Life is a Pattern by System of a Down and the other one is the Pattern Life by Despair. I liked the description of Despair from this page: “The heaviest thing in Buffalo, New York, next to the snowfall”.

    There is also a book (xpensive!) called The Pattern of Life. According to Wikipedia its author Alfred Adler was an Austrian psychologist and was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement.

    So there are plenty of things to be found while searching for “life pattern” 🙂