Artificial Misnomer.

 A new automated dear deterrent employed by Network Rail to keep deer away form the tracks uses 'Artificial intelligence'.  Upon reading the article I think we can safely say that they have a very loose definition of artificial intelligence - it detects when a deer is there and sounds an alarm.  

I have a very low regard for anything that calls itself AI.  I know how it uses LLMs (large language models) to 'train' itself, but at the end of the day it's only using a set of rules it has created based on the LLM it is using as the base data.  I did read last week that 'the hype has gone out of AI' - thank goodness for that, but I expect it will not die away completely.  It get an impression that any software that uses a set of algorithms to work out what to do has been renamed AI , mainly (I expect to) for marketing purposes.

   

5 Years (David Bowie)

Molly-Mae and Tommy have split up.  Wow - it's one of the minor headlines in media outlets everywhere.

Hang on, who the flip are they?  It took me about 48hrs before I clicked on one of the articles that revealed they met on Love Island in 2019.  That's impressive - 5 years of being together.

Anyway, it's just yet another example of 'celebrity' that I try and avoid at all cost, and what constitutes as 'news' nowadays.

Never Say Never again.

 1 week on from the triathlon and I need to get down on paper how it went.

The first thing was that the swim was cancelled late on Friday evening round 10 o'clock due to blue-green algae being above safe levels and would be replaced by a 5K run - so we're now doing a duathlon.  In actual fact, I had mixed emotions about the swim cancellation.. happy because I was quite anxious about the swim in the first place, but unhappy because once again it wasn't a 'real' triathlon as in 2019 when the bike leg was deemed too wet to start.  However, it made it a much more relaxed pre-race day without worrying about the swim to run transition and I slept really well.

They started the 5K run 40 minutes later than the swim had been planned for, and set us off in groups of around 50 at 1min intervals.  This seemed to work quite well in that the bike start was reasonably 'quiet' without too much traffic.  I planned on a 30 min run and came in at 29 mins so all well there.

There was little wind on the bike, and slightly overcast for the start so didn't think overheating would be an issue.  However, cramps started about 30 miles from the end and progressively got worse.  I'm not sure why the cramps got so bad - I was taking in plenty of water with and without High 5 electrolytes but I did cover the 1st half much faster than I thought I was going to (averaging 21.5 at one point) so that might have had something to do with it.  Anyway, finished without any dramas but had slowed to an average of 18.5mph at the end.  I got off the bike and quickly got a leg cramp fortunately only briefly and trotted into transition.

Run?  It was a walk/run, with the emphasis on the walk part.  Cramps kicked in almost as soon as I started off, so bad that I had to stop completely unable to move my left leg.  After a couple of minutes of massaging the muscle and trying to get it to respond I managed to hobble on my way.  This continued every couple of hundred yards for the first 3 or 4 miles, gradually getting less severe and able to walk through it rather than stopping.  5 and a half hours later I finished - my worst ever marathon time.  Don't know if I could have run a bit more, but the cramps were so bad at the start I wonder if my fear of stopping overcame my need to run a bit more.  Interestingly, I managed to run most of the last lap of the lake albeit slowly so it's not as if I was incapable.

Anyway, after all that my finish time of 13:16 was enough to get me 2nd place in the 65-70 age category around 20 mins behind 1st place.  Lets hope next time is better.