Running Speeds
allendowney.com
Running Speeds
1–10 of 195 posts
Re: Running Speeds
#2Nitpicking: to truly compare the running times they should use the same shoes and tracks.
There is a lot of effort put in to make athletes faster. I doubt Usain Bolt would be under 20s on a dirt track.
Re: Running Speeds
#3If your high school math would only consist of working through the various books of Allen Downey you would get a very rigorous, basic introduction to: programming, computer science, statistics, computational and Bayesian thinking and a lot more. You could write and compare simple to intermediate programs in many programming languages, where you’d have experience in implementing the same structures in different languages. Distributions and sampling wouldn’t scare you. It would beat high school math (at least mine in the 90s) by a million miles.
Did I mention I think Allen is totally great yet?
Re: Running Speeds
#4Nitpicking: to truly compare the running times they should use the same shoes and tracks. There is a lot of effort put in to make athletes faster. I doubt Usain Bolt would be under 20s on a dirt track.
I guess this can be incorporated as one of the multiplicative factors that determine the overall speed of a runner.
Re: Running Speeds
#5If your high school math would only consist of working through the various books of Allen Downey you would get a very rigorous, basic introduction to: programming, computer science, statistics, computational and Bayesian thinking and a lot more. You could write and compare simple to intermediate programs in many programming languages, where you’d have experience in implementing the same structures in different langua…
This article is bollocks, though. It's a fit of highly unrepresentative data, not even a good one, but worse: it doesn't explain anything. If you take that model seriously, Usain Bolt could have been anybody in the entire history of mankind.
Re: Running Speeds
#6If your high school math would only consist of working through the various books of Allen Downey you would get a very rigorous, basic introduction to: programming, computer science, statistics, computational and Bayesian thinking and a lot more. You could write and compare simple to intermediate programs in many programming languages, where you’d have experience in implementing the same structures in different langua…
Is this a reasonable comparison? I‘m unfamiliar with these works but would someone be able to work through them without the basic math knowledge that they acquired in school? If not then they are not an alternative to math in school?
Re: Running Speeds
#7If your high school math would only consist of working through the various books of Allen Downey you would get a very rigorous, basic introduction to: programming, computer science, statistics, computational and Bayesian thinking and a lot more. You could write and compare simple to intermediate programs in many programming languages, where you’d have experience in implementing the same structures in different langua…
This article is bollocks, though. It's a fit of highly unrepresentative data, not even a good one, but worse: it doesn't explain anything. If you take that model seriously, Usain Bolt could have been anybody in the entire history of mankind.
There’s two types of people in the world: those that build models and those that complain about the models than have been built.
Seriously though, Allen is an instructor. These are educational pieces to bring a spark of understanding and creativity to students. I don’t think he is aspiring on modeling the absolute truth in these posts.
This piece has a learning about the working of non-normal distributions in sampling and reasoning about cut-off points.
Re: Running Speeds
#8If your high school math would only consist of working through the various books of Allen Downey you would get a very rigorous, basic introduction to: programming, computer science, statistics, computational and Bayesian thinking and a lot more. You could write and compare simple to intermediate programs in many programming languages, where you’d have experience in implementing the same structures in different langua…
Is this a reasonable comparison? I‘m unfamiliar with these works but would someone be able to work through them without the basic math knowledge that they acquired in school? If not then they are not an alternative to math in school?
I can say I’ve worked through four of his books from front to cover. You’re right. The learnings are on top of (some) math. In my case actually quite a lot of math post-high school. But I think a 14 year old could finish the books as well, or at least 90%.
My eldest is 10. He is good at math because we do math games all the time. I can’t get algebra to sink in properly yet. Doesn’t really click in the time we have and with the teacher he has (me). But in Python he is giving variables a name all the time. Perhaps there is something about programmatic math that helps, not hinders education.
Re: Running Speeds
#9I'm not sure this analysis is as surprising or meaningful as it might seem at first sight.
In the end I think what this tells us is that in the general population there are many distinct subpopulations with different distributions of running speed. I would expect that if you start conditioning on things (e.g. gender, age, level of fitness) things start looking a lot more normal, rather than log-normal.
You might not be able to beat the Freeze simply because you're not a young fit male who trains to run fast. Really nothing surprising here.
Re: Running Speeds
#10If your high school math would only consist of working through the various books of Allen Downey you would get a very rigorous, basic introduction to: programming, computer science, statistics, computational and Bayesian thinking and a lot more. You could write and compare simple to intermediate programs in many programming languages, where you’d have experience in implementing the same structures in different langua…
This article is bollocks, though. It's a fit of highly unrepresentative data, not even a good one, but worse: it doesn't explain anything. If you take that model seriously, Usain Bolt could have been anybody in the entire history of mankind.
"All models are wrong, some are useful." Heard it so many times during my Ph.D.