Now that brain drain isn't required to get a great job, we will finally see a diversity of distribution in talent instead of east/west coast. This will be a good thing. It's completely unsustainable to have talent cloistered away forever and always in the same couple spots.
Exposure to smallpox wiped out populations in two continents from no prior exposure. The quoted “not necessarily” isn’t a ringing endorsement. Chickenpox is another example of early exposure/vaccine or very bad things happen.
> Chickenpox is another example of early exposure/vaccine or very bad things happen.
Side note, even early exposure may not help. I got it twice and the second was rough. It also carries a higher risk of shingles later in life and could impact the nervous system. Please consider vaccinating your kids against chickenpox.
There needs to be a great deal of introspection in the coming months. About what cultural practices are allowed to continue, and which are not. We need to have solutions for people that rely on dangerous ways of securing food an alternate method that's safer for everyone. We need to look closely at resource utilization and ask ourselves if we need to spend X amount of space/water for Y product, just because previously we have done so. We need to consume less, travel less, be more responsible.
Giving up some of the night sky for the billions of humans that live in rural areas, or live in countries where the physical internet is controlled by oppressive governments hellbent on withholding information from its citizens is worth it. The trillions of dollars it would take to build out infrastructure (and maintain) in Africa and India is worth it. In fact, even 20 Mbps would be life changing in bringing information to ~10-15% of humans is worth it.
I'm glad you think it's worth it. I'm not as sure, personally. Especially since your examples don't hold water with me.
Oppressive governments that don't like the internet aren't going to just allow the transceivers. They need line of sight to the sky and even if you hide them, detecting them would be trivial. Super rural areas and 3rd world areas have their own set of problems. I'm thinking of the OLPC type issues here. I'm all for spreading knowledge, but these areas have far bigger issues than internet access.
Personally, I view this as just another bulldozing a place of nature to build a hospital or something like that. Is that hospital useful? Undoubtedly. Is it worth having one less place of nature? Debatable.
The only difference is scale. We're talking about the destruction of a place of nature for the entire world. Over dramatized? I don't think so- there are many examples of people talking about looking up at the stars in wonderment, driving them to great things. Maybe that will still happen when there are thousands of satellites streaming by, but nobody has that foresight.
Yeah, all that talk about free internet for all the poor and oppressed sounds pretty suspicious set beside the claims that starlink is supposed to make money too. How will a rural Guatemalan farmer that cooks on a three stones fire provide any sort of profit?
Don't underestimate how cheap smartphones + solar is and how cheap Starlink actually is.
Sure he cooks on a fire because it's practical. You don't need to fetch gas/fuel for your stove. Now with Starlink you won't need to go to town once a week to check your bitcoin transactions.
You’ve missed out on irony and bitcoin and guatemala farmer (cant find it right now). Also you are underestimating the needs of impoverished people. Part of impoverishment is lack of connectivity and facilities to charge phone. Not other way around.
It's just gonna be routed thru China. Probably each country internet is going to go first thru local provider, unless you've got some sort of privilege (same as it is now with VPN's).
IMO at least some of the problem is the historical laxness with which California has approached drugs. You have decades and decades of drug use being de facto legal to the point where now you will not be arrested for shooting heroin in front of a police officer. You could tax all the billionaires out of the state and they still not afford the rehab expense for all of the addicts in California. How many chances do you get at success? Why not just start taking heroin so you get a free stay indoors, with free food at a rehab resort?
So you don't use 3rd party packages? Because the moment you use one you don't fully understand it --that comes with time. You can't magically know every nuance about a package before you start using it. I haven't looked at the code at all for momentjs or the internals of Vue, there's still a lot I don't know about their api's but doesn't mean I still don't get value out of using them.
If you're corrupt, the safest place to be is looking for the corruption. Refund the OTA, staff it with people friendly to you, reset the rules in your favor, now everyone of the opposite party is behind the eight ball. Sounds like a power grab to me.
Barely, if any, difference between the sexes in races at this distance. More women competing mean more will continue to win. Congrats to the BAMF who won.
It's great when women win these races, and I wish there were more, but don't get the misperception they are somehow faster in this sport compared to men than in other sports. It all depends who shows up on the start line. Elite women are faster than nearly all the men, so if an elite woman shows up, but no elite men do, she will likely win.
List of ultrarunning records: https://ultrarunning.com/featured/ultrarunning-magazine-all-...
Normally awards are for "First Place Male" and First Place Female." Not sure why this race had an award for "overall."
To be fair, the differences here seem to be smaller than in other sports, suggesting that while testosterone is a factor it may be less than it is in other sports. If 90% of the competitors in these races are male, that would further impact this discrepancy.
Why would that matter? They're not running as a group; if you're the fastest then you win. This isn't a probabilistic thing. Lots of slow men crowding the starting line isn't going to impact who finishes first.
I'm not sure I even understand your argument. It's possible we're saying different things? What I'm saying is that if X people try a sport the records they set won't be nearly as good as if 100X people are trying it. Winners are by definition outliers, and the larger your population, the more (and more extreme) outliers you will see. So if there are five times fewer women than men () competing in a sport, that will impact comparisons between women and men, even at the top levels, at least if you want to compare innate ability. Almost certainly, the women's records and top female performances would look better if there were five times as many women trying the sport as there currently are. Do you disagree with that?
I pulled up the most recent Ironman race; there were 5 men for every woman in the competition. So I'm using that as a rule of the thumb. But the same logic applies to any population imbalance at the top of the funnel.
That's quite the leap of logic hiding in that deceptively small "all else equal", what leads you to believe that everyone in a race has an equal chance of winning it?
>what leads you to believe that everyone in a race has an equal chance of winning it?
I made no such assumption.
If you pull runner speeds from any distribution, and label 90% of those numbers "male" and 10% "female", 90% of the time the highest speed will be labelled "male".
Even if you are pulling the female runner speeds from a slightly faster distribution, if most of the people running are men then men will still win most of the time.
Failing to normalize by the population sizes at the start of the race is a blatant mathematical error. Until you fix it your argument is flawed and if you don't fix it you're willfully wrong.
You literally wrote "all else equal" in your comment.
> pull runner speeds from any distribution
Not true. If I pick a distribution of elite women and non-athlete men, all of the top finishers will be women. You're assuming speeds are normally distributed; they are not.
Where is this data that you're citing here? It doesn't line up with any data I've seen, nor with my extensive experience in amateur racing. Most races are won by the same small group of elite runners. The size of the field is immaterial as the majority of racers have no chance of winning.
Normalizing for population size might make sense if you actually had to beat everyone independently. Fortunately, you're only racing the person in first so everyone else can be safely ignored.
Put another way, if Michael Phelps is racing he's going to win. You can only win by beating him, the rest of the field doesn't matter.
>>You literally wrote "all else equal" in your comment.
That's different from the assumption that all competitors are equally likely to win.
>You're assuming speeds are normally distributed
No. Any distribution will work.
>Where is this data that you're citing here?
I didn't say anything about data. I said your argument has a blatant mathematical flaw. You said "why would it matter" in response to "if 90% of the competitors [are men]". It absolutely matters. Even if you do turn out to be correct about women being worse at this sport, you are only right in the broken clock sense.
>Put another way, if Michael Phelps is racing he's going to win. You can only win by beating him, the rest of the field doesn't matter.
The people who show up to the race are coming out of some distribution. Michael Phelps isn't showing up to every race. The probability that you win the race comes down to how fast you are vs. the max of n samples from the distribution of runners.
The list of the winner of some annual marathon is a really shitty piece of evidence. Out of all the racers and times taken, it gives us data on exactly one of them. It is especially useless to try and breakdown running ability by demographic because it doesn't even tell us how much data we have on each demographic of interest.
If you don't see why just citing the list of marathon winners fails to reject the hypothesis that women and men are about equal at ultra-marathons, then you don't understand what makes for a good data-supported argument.
This is what happens when you don't look at the data and argue from your gut. We don't just learn about one person, timed races release bib data for everyone in that race.
If you're a data nerd and a runner armed with this knowledge, it will have occurred to you to wonder if distance (in time) from the winner is correlated with gender and field size. It is not. Thus, you're proposing that we "normalize" for something which is shown to not have an effect on who wins a race.
~~All the distances in those tables are significantly longer than the 50k this article was about.~~
Edit: Ah, I missed it due to the weird order - but my original point stands, there is no point in ignoring part of someone's comment when trying to rebut them.
Interestingly, the 100m record difference is about 10%, which is roughly the same as the gap in the ultramarathon records (and in the record mile time). So the difference is fairly consistent across distances.
I don't think it's quite that close -- there may be sample size/participation factors involved here. For example, the top US women seems to be competitive with the top ~10 US men, which in more testosterone-dominant sports would never happen.
Because it does highlight what women are capable of and it is certainly something to celebrate. Also, when it does happen it creates an interesting story which brings more attention to the sport (like this one did).
That women are winning these races, is a credit to this sport. Sports have no intrinsic value that isn't somehow tied to the good they do for humanity. We should judge them by their fruits. Even so, the vast majority of sports are constructed so that, on average, men have big advantages. It could be that it's easier to construct a sport that way. It could also be that constructing a sport that way better appeals to the prejudices of society. After all, there are some sports in which women compete at the highest level. For example, horse racing, open-water swimming, and as we see here "ultra" running. It's not necessary for women to win all or even most of the top prizes, but it's great that they win sometimes. Personally, although I enjoy watching gendered sports like ice hockey and American football I definitely see them as inferior to sports that exhibit more gender equality.
Sure, running in general is basic to humans. The particular circumstances of particular races, like "so many laps over this particular course through the mountains" are very much a decision that some people made. Such decisions affect the results of those races.
It is illogical to believe that races were "constructed" by somehow varying the number of laps or terrain to make sure men win. It is far more likely that races were "constructed" to mimic the types of terrain people already ran.
No, it´s better for everybody - the human race wins.
Let´s say you had a bunch of computers, and somebody had told you a certain type always ran slowly, so you never used them for anything fast, and even put them on slower connections, because of that. And then one day, you discovered if you connected them up to faster links, they ran faster.
You now have a larger number of faster computers. As with computers, so with society, it´s not a zero sum game.
Looking at those dates in the 24 hour and 100 mile.
Most of the women records are in the last 5 years, and some of the men’s records are from much longer ago.
All the records actually show men still have the physical advantage at these distances that they do at shorter distances. It would be cool if somehow women were faster in comparison the longer the distance, but the records don't show that to be the case.
This is pedantic, even for HN! Who said anything about being "initially" faster? To win a race, you need to maintain the fastest average speed out of all competitors, plain and simple.
Not really, my point was that the typical male, while able to run faster outright, typically will slow down. Professionals of course will know their limits and run at a pace they can keep. The typical woman tends to run slower, but more able to keep a consistent speed and thus could come out in front.
But this is for the average case and not the professional case, where men tend to dominate anyway.
> Barely, if any, difference between the sexes in races at this distance.
Are there any facts that back up this claim?
50k is barely over marathon distance, and there is a huge difference between woman and men on marathon distance (~2:01 for men vs ~2:15 for woman (10% slower).
I don't know of any longer distance running event in which such a gap doesn't actually increase. That is, the larger the distance, the slower woman actually become relatively to men.
At the far end, for example, for the Spartathlon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartathlon), the fastest men complete the distance in around ~21 hours while the fastest woman takes ~24 hours (13% slower). If you look at the times of the top 3 males and woman of each year, most years top 3 mens finish in ~<24 hours, while women are at ~<31 hours.
It might be interesting to visualize the gap per year vs the temperature. There are some studies about how heat affects the running performance of men and woman in marathon distance races, but not so much for long distance races (https://insights.ovid.com/article/00005768-200703000-00012). IIRC (don't take me for this), heat affects slower runners more independently of sex.
> Barely, if any, difference between the sexes in races at this distance
This is 31 miles, which is not much longer than a standard 26.2 mile marathon. Marathons have a lot of competition, so we can see how top athletes compare, and there the record is 2:01 for men vs 2:15 for women. What you're saying is for much longer races.
> I believe there’s a wall at about 20 miles, too.
~20 miles is the distance that a "median" person can run before muscle glycogen is depleted and less efficient energy-production mechanisms must take up the slack. The size (and duration) of one's muscle glycogen stores depends on many factors, including the physical size of muscles, efficiency of reintroduction of liver glycogen, training status, running economy, GI effectiveness vs stress, and many others.
Interestingly enough, in longer ultras one gets the chance to conquer the "wall," recover, and then hit it all over again, maybe several times.
It's hard to tell how much things like that reflect the shape of the maximum human performance curve, vs which sports are worth it for which athletes to reach peak performance.
Congratulations to her. But that’s really not true. Women’s records lag behind men’s records in all endurance categories. Women’s results lag behind men’s results in major events. The woman’s world record marathon wouldn’t be a first place at any major event. Her time in this 50k was more than an hour and ten minutes behind the 50k world record suggesting the competition at this event simply wasn’t very stiff.
a good example of endurance differences would be the track bicycle hour record (merckx type frame/wheelset, or modern track bike) difference between men and women:
When people talk about women being better than men at endurance, they don't mean things at the ~1hr level. Instead, the events where the top women are close to competitive with the top men are at the ~days level.
> Instead, the events where the top women are close to competitive with the top men are at the ~days level.
People keep repeating this idea throughout thread but as user geargrinder posted earlier, the difference at the ~days level is pretty big, at least in ultra running. For example [1]:
1000 miles Records
Men: Yiannis Kouros - 10 d + 10:30:35
Women: Sandy Barwick - 12 d + 14:38:40
I had also heard - and believed - the idea that women were roughly equal at ultra distances but seeing the tables posted by geargrinder has been a massive revelation to the contrary for me. Is there some other proof that indeed backs the claim that women are roughly equal at large distances, or is this a total urban legend?
The fact that the parent comment was talking about “these distances” aside, men still outperform women in that level of ultra-endurance. The problem you have though is getting any meaningful samples. Each course is different, those races have very few entrants, and far fewer female entrants. Some of those races have been won by women, and there are even some particularly obscure world records held by women, but nothing you could reasonably point to as a trend.
I understand that, but was trying to think of an endurance sport that removes as many physical variables as possible. Same track, same equipment, same temperatures and atmospheric density, etc. The question about multi day events is that there's a number of variables for choosing a route over off-road courses, peak effort during a particular time of day (sun is up vs down), how much sleep a person gets.
The people who regularly win RAAM (race across america) are the masochists who are able to combine peak athletic performance and 2.5 hours of sleep a night for a week.
Obviously something else much longer than 1 hour, with as many variables removed would be a better comparison. I don't think a traditional road race would work, since there's too many variables about team/pack strategy, the peloton, breakaways, etc. But possibly a 2 or 3 hour solo time trial on the same course.
testosterone doesn't just help with building muscles, it helps with muscle recovery and creating red blood cells.
I would guess there's a sweet spot in distance where the finish times in men and women are closer, but considering testosterone helps with muscle recovery and creating red blood cells, I don't think it would be a multi day distance.
