Pointless Prizes 2015

[Steve O]

New thread here focused on this year’s Pointless Prizes. I have volunteered to “organize” the PP presentation at the final happy hour.
So if you are planning to offer a PP, or if you want to bounce around ideas, or you want to fashion some fantastic wooden medallions, or anything else related to Pointless Prizes, this is your thread.

Don’t clutter this thread with side bets (which can also win PPs). Create a new thread for each side bet. I’ll keep track of those separately for the awards.

Also, although I will “organize” the PP awards “ceremony,” if you are offering a Pointless Prize, you will award it yourself.

Topic

[ShawnoftheDread]

Ride your driveway on your own time — in April.

[cvcalhoun]

@lordofthemark 111060 wrote:

Getting them to cooperate in finding a way to win a pointless side bet would confirm them that I have, at last, totally lost it.

What, you still have friends who don’t believe they have already confirmed that you have totally lost it? Clearly, you just aren’t trying hard enough!

[Steve O]

@americancyclo 111100 wrote:

yes, as long as it shows up as a sleaze day when i run the final numbers!

Okay, I misunderstood the intent of this prize at the beginning then. I thought it was intended for someone who did a short ride that was real hilly. Instead it appears it could be won by someone who rode any distance whatsoever but had two miles of steep parts in it somewhere. Clarified.

[rcannon100]

As I asked this morning, what will we fight about when BAS2015 is over?

[jrenaut]

@rcannon100 111183 wrote:

As I asked this morning, what will we fight about when BAS2015 is over?

Blinking headlights on trails, calling your passes, vehicular cycling, whether or not water is wet…. I wouldn’t worry.

[cvcalhoun]

@Steve O 111179 wrote:

Okay, I misunderstood the intent of this prize at the beginning then. I thought it was intended for someone who did a short ride that was real hilly. Instead it appears it could be won by someone who rode any distance whatsoever but had two miles of steep parts in it somewhere. Clarified.

Only if the someone were willing to give up the points for the rest of the day’s rides. Personally, I’m voting that we encourage everyone in Octothorpe to try for this prize every day for the rest of Freezing Saddles.

[DismalScientist]

@americancyclo 111003 wrote:

https://www.strava.com/activities/249462449

I got ripped off. Now I see why people pay big bucks for Garmins. My phone couldn’t tell whether I was in the street or on folk’s lawns. This ride should have killed yours since it was a 9.4% grade, while your segment says 6.4%. Oh well, here it is: http://www.strava.com/activities/268295769

[hozn]

A quick update. I’m working on Rod’s Eddington Number (as it pertains to cycling, not astrophysics) leaderboard. I have a suspicion we may have multiple people with the same value, but maybe there will be a clear winner. (Actually, I’m not sure what the prize criteria were.) Of course, I would assume if the challenge is for highest E number the winner would be Eric …

I am dedicating myself to do this purely in SQL which is proving challenging to me — especially with the limitations of MySQL [which is my only option on the shared hosting provider].

I started by creating a view of the data that simply takes the truncated distance — floor(ride.distance) — and counts the number of times each person rode rides of that distance.

So, for a specific athlete, we might have a table like:

Dist Freq
8 7
6 10
3 5
1 2

Then I took that data and changed the frequency to the sum of frequency for all distances >= each distance. Meaning that really, in the chart above the 1 mile ride was done 24 times, not 2.

Dist Freq
8 7
6 17
3 22
1 24

And then, the tricky part (for MySQL especially) is realizing that the E number for this rider (assuming I’ve understood this correctly) is actually a number that falls between the distance values — it is 7. Because they rode [at least] 7 miles 7 times.

So to do that, I have to fill in the gaps in the distances, joining against a table of incrementing numbers. In other database (like postgres) this is easy to do at runtime; in MySQL you just have to create a table or view of just pure numbers and then join that up. So the result will look like:

Dist Freq
8 7
7 7
6 17
5 17
4 17
3 22
2 22
1 24

That part isn’t actually quite done, though I finally had a breakthrough before going to bed on how I’d accomplish this. It would have been so trivial to just pull the values into a python script and do it the naive way. But this is much more fun.

Oh, my E number for FS2015 period is 18. Made me realize how few long rides I’ve done this winter. Thanks to not being on a real team.

[dkel]

Huh? :confused:

[Raymo853]

@DismalScientist 111263 wrote:

I got ripped off. Now I see why people pay big bucks for Garmins. My phone couldn’t tell whether I was in the street or on folk’s lawns. This ride should have killed yours since it was a 9.4% grade, while your segment says 6.4%. Oh well, here it is: http://www.strava.com/activities/268295769

Smart phones are not GPS units. Smart phones are not GPS units. Well designed smart phones will have GPS receivers, but only use them as a last resort. It is much quicker, less processor intensive (aka less battery drain) and more beneficial to their data collection to locate you using by using the towers, wifi fields, heatmaps of past users and already mapped data.

[Sunyata]

@dkel 111628 wrote:

Huh? :confused:

My thoughts exactly. I guess this is why I am in public safety instead of… whatever that was (statistics? programming? Yiddish?).

[hozn]

@dkel 111628 wrote:

Huh? :confused:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Eddington#Eddington_number_for_cycling

Eddington number for cycling/COLOR][URL=”http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arthur_Eddington&action=edit&section=9″%5Dedit%5B/URL%5D%5BCOLOR=#555555

Eddington is credited with devising a measure of a cyclist’s long-distance riding achievements. The Eddington number in the context of cycling is defined as the maximum number E such that the cyclist has cycled E miles on E days.^[14][15] For example an Eddington number of 70 would imply that the cyclist has cycled at least 70 miles in a day on 70 occasions. Achieving a high Eddington number is difficult since moving from, say, 70 to 75 will probably require more than five new long distance rides since any rides shorter than 75 miles will no longer be included in the reckoning. Eddington’s own E-number was 84.^[16]

I just realized in reading this that I may need to change my calculations to do *per day* as opposed to *per ride*. That should be an easy change.

[jrenaut]

@hozn 111627 wrote:

It would have been so trivial to just pull the values into a python script and do it the naive way.

Python is always the answer. Unless it’s a Javascript question, and then the answer is either “No, you should never do that, step away from the computer right now” or “JQuery”.

[rcannon100]

I think my Eddington number is like 7.

[chris_s]

@hozn 111627 wrote:

And then, the tricky part (for MySQL especially) is realizing that the E number for this rider (assuming I’ve understood this correctly) is actually a number that falls between the distance values — it is 7. Because they rode [at least] 7 miles 7 times.

OOoooo….tricksey!

[Author]

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