Not strong enough. My hands certainly aren't strong enough to grip something and bear my own weight. I'm sure that can be trained, but it doesn't come as naturally for us as it does for brachiating apes.
It does. Getting your stomach good at that (and figuring out what food you can personally tolerate best) is a nontrivial part of training for longer ultramarathons.
Breaking down fat costs a lot of oxygen. The body can run on fat if you have a lot of oxygen to spare. If the effort is causing you to breath heavily, then you are probably mostly burning faster carbohydrates (glycogen, a sort of sugary fuel the body has already stored in the muscles).
Running out of fast carbohydrates is (at least in biking) called "bonking". You'll feel extremely tired, maybe be shaking, and feeling dizzy. It's a blood sugar dip: a very low and long dip. Your brain usually runs on sugar too, so you'll feel stupid and angry. Your body still has fat stores, so your body can keep running - but at a much lower effort intensity.
I was expecting something a bit more comprehensive and damning after the link… but if one of the most objectionable and controversial claims in the book is about adverbs modifying “unique” I think I’ll continue to recommend elements of style.
For me, the most damning thing about the book is the invective against the passive. The book opens with use of the passive voice, its authors apparently unaware how idiomatic its use is in certain circumstances. It introduces the passive voice with a sentence that is in the passive voice but is so independently clunky that an astute reader would wonder "no, wait, why would anyone attempt the passive?" It then goes through a rewriting-several-examples section where only one of the four examples manages to start in the passive.
Why should one use a book on English grammar that can't correctly identify English grammar in the first place?
(For reference, the first sentence is "This book is intended for use in English courses in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature.")
Out of curiosity I googled "we intend this book" and people do seem to use that wording sometimes in introducing their books. Why don't Strunk and White do that?
Not certain as to why, but one plausible explanation is an opinion that using first person pronouns would be inappropriate, as it is "too conversational" or something like that.
That seems plausible, and pretty much demands the passive voice. Otherwise they would have had to do something like "The authors intend this book..." which is rather strange when the authors are also the ones who wrote the sentence.
> ..but if one of the most objectionable and controversial claims in the book is about adverbs modifying “unique”..
This reads like plain bad faith. Pullum lists a dozen or so very specific problems with S+W, and goes on at some length about the evidence against each. Any of those problems is more objectionable than the "modifying unique" thing, which Pullum mentions once in passing but doesn't discuss.
It's such a bad book. Why would you continue to recommend it? It doesn't follow its own advice. It doesn't have any clue of how language actually functions. The style it purports to offer up is old and crusty. There are far better books that take a more correct view of the differences between style and correctness (Pinker's, King's).
There's a reason linguists hate S&W. It's really not good.
"Conceivably Strunk was trying to inculcate in everyone the habit of writing like Henry James and not like Mark Twain" was where I lost it. And I love Twain!
If the MVP isn't good enough to get useful feedback from customers, you need to either 1) narrow the set of people you consider as early customers or 2) it's not an MVP yet.
Long ago when I was a physics grad student, I distinctly remember that when someone introduced Bayesian statistics in a talk, it was because they were trying to justify weeding outliers from their data by hand. And they always got called to task on it.
I think that it’s right to call out scientists who think that math is reality.
We made math up, end of story. The “Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics“ is obvious selection bias.
Math, statistics, is a tool. I don’t expect my shovel to be a dowsing rod, and I don’t expect my bayesian methods to predict the future. But, shovels do dig wells and probably does, on average, work out; neither is worthy of being disregarded. But, there have literally been folks since Pythagoras‘s time who believe that logic, and math, are The Truth. Like, God: The Truth. Like, it works because it’s the way that nature is, and we understand and control it and itis math… a “Natural Law”.
A better scientific mind does not fall for such folly. The “outliers” are the very phenomena that science wants to study. If we can explain the outliers through an error in method, fine. But, if the outliers are not able to be explained then we would never want to gloss over them because they don’t fit our expectations of a mathematical model of reality.
