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GPS Watch? No Thanks. Top Runners Are Ditching the Data.

For many, GPS watches are a remarkably useful training tool. But there are other runners, including world-class runners like Jacobs, who have a hard time understanding the fuss. To them, a smorgasbord of data is more hindrance than help. And get this: Some runners don’t wear watches at all.

I’m sympathetic to this idea. In general, I’m trying to stop obsessing over my health and fitness data (tough for this data analyst to do). That said, I’m far from an elite runner. So, I don’t have enough body awareness to intuitively know my pace zones and find realtime data on my performance helpful for making sure my runs are effective.

Perhaps more importantly, my watch is also my source of music and a way to keep my family updated when I’m out on a long run.

I don’t expect to be running out the door without my watch anytime soon.

Interesting guest column by Reg Whitaker in Wesley Wark’s National Security and Intelligence Newsletter

The leading physicists mobilized in the Manhattan Project were on the one hand applying intelligence in the sense of the same pure quest for knowledge that had driven the discoveries of scientists from Galileo to Einstein. On the other hand as a military scheme, the Manhattan Project was an intelligence problem in the sense of secrets that had to be protected from enemy eyes, or indeed from any eyes, friendly or unfriendly, from outside the charmed circle of the initiated and security-cleared.

Finished reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler has so many fascinating ideas about consciousness, intelligence, and language embedded in a good story about a community of octopuses. I really enjoyed this one📚