Nassim Taleb, author of the New York Times bestseller The Black Swan, was the first person ever to email me here at the Knackered Hack.

No, honestly, it’s true. In the annals of this blog, that was seen as something of a red-letter day (if not a black swan event). But its relative importance on the part of the sender was naturally quite insignificant. Let’s say, our relationship was perfectly asymmetrical. So, when I turned up to meet Taleb at his London hotel recently, without the more imposing affiliation of a national media title with which to introduce myself, it took a while for it to sink in just who in publicity hell I was.

Finally, after 10 minutes, the author exclaimed in his soft Levantine accent: “Ah, I remember! You’re the marathon guy with the picture!”

Rarely have I been so pleased to be recognised for so little. It was nice to know that I registered with Taleb less as a total “unknown, unknown” and more as just faintly forgettable. Taleb had been researching blogs with a view to publicising his latest book, and had hit on this humble site. “I saw you writing about my book Fooled by Randomness on a marathon blog. I said to myself, this guy’s interesting!”

Even better! It’s a rare journalist who gets an actual compliment from the The Black Swan author.

As we exchanged initial small talk about exercise, I explained that I was a bit annoyed by all this complexity stuff of his, because his work has devalued most of my post-graduate business studies. Moreover, after leaving business school I moved on to devote a lot of my spare time to marathon training. But lately, having suffered repeated illness and injury and read the blog of another student of complexity, Art De Vany, I’d been led to the conclusion that this marathon malarkey might be injurious to health as well.

At this point a jet-lagged, publicity-dazed Taleb came alive: Continue reading ‘Caveman lunch with taleb’

It’s a little uncanny, about an hour ago I did a Google Images search for romanescu, and then just a few minutes later, the Knackered Hackette opens a marketing email from the folks at Innocent — manufacturers of the smoothie drinks — with exactly the same idea. Talk about self-similar .

With all the discussion of Mandelbrot in Taleb’s book, I had the idea that we might post a fractal for your delight once a week. Perhaps we’d call it “Fractal Friday” — something to look forward to as we wind down for the weekend. Taleb suggests that fractal shapes are good to contemplate — they are restful in their variation, and may stimulate creativity (more on that soon). Our favourite in daily life has to be the vegetable romanescu, delivered from Riverford Farm in Devon, when in season.

Well, Innocent provides this link to a great site by John Walker with some wonderful images of a romanescu cauliflower/cabbage/broccoli (including the one above), and a more technical discussion of fractals than we are capable of.

In the Knackered House all brassicas go by the nickname “Roman Doctor”: somewhere I half-remember reading (this usually means I made it up) that the Romans did not need physicians because their diet was full of life-preserving cabbage. It does not matter whether it is true or not. In our self-experimenting home, unlike the Knackered Hack’s own childhood behaviour, the kids know not to argue when told to eat their greens.

So goes the Talking Heads song, invoking our hunter-gatherer past. Nuts and berries must therefore be good for running, surely. I’ve not been consuming so many nuts of late, although there are still plenty left over from the Christmas larder. Berries are a different matter. At the best of times, they are expensive, and so not a regular part of the diet except in high summer. They are rich in anti-oxidants, and so good for fixing life’s daily damage. They’re supposed to be very good for muscle repair.

However, the past couple of weeks, we’ve started buying Innocent smoothies. They’re expensive compared with juice drinks. But it looks now like a false economy. The volume of fruit they contain seems enormous, particularly berries. And boy are they tasty. They do a kids’ version which has each portion that makes up that five-a-day equation marked out on the side. Feels like pure food, albeit from a carton.

Friday was a rest day, and today I remembered I could cross-train on the bike and save the legs some impact. Sunday is important for a long-run, the first in nearly a month because of virus, so saving the legs an extra day should be better in the longer term.

Resting heart rate 49 bpm

Weight 71 kg

Mood

Total excercise energy burned 588 kcal (45 mins bike)