Recent quotes:

The State of the Industry: 2022 RaceTrends Report is Here! – RunSignup Blog

Largest races were the hardest hit, with races of more than 5,000 participants averaging 19% fewer participants than in 2019 while races with fewer than 500 participants actually grew 3.4% […]20% of 2019 events did not take place in 2022, including 14% that did not take place in either 2021 or 2022 […]Just 14% of participants from 2021 repeated the same event in 2022 (down from 19% in 2018)

When scientific conferences went online, diversity and inclusion soared | Careers | Chemistry World

‘Factors including cost, gender, career stage and geographic location were evaluated,’ the study authors explained. ‘Virtual conferences demonstrated a clearly discernible and, in some cases, orders of magnitude improvement across nearly all metrics.’

From Laura Baldwin - O’Reilly Media

Today, we’re sharing the news that we’ve made the very difficult decision to cancel all future O’Reilly in-person conferences and close down this portion of our business. Without understanding when this global health emergency may come to an end, we can’t plan for or execute on a business that will be forever changed as a result of this crisis. With large technology vendors moving their events completely on-line, we believe the stage is set for a new normal moving forward when it comes to in-person events.

The Races Are Virtual but the Running Is Real - The New York Times

The New York Road Runners’ virtual races are free, unless runners are using them as a way to get into a sellout race. In 2018, the organization opened 500 spots for runners to run a virtual marathon, which, if they completed it, would get them a race medal and guaranteed entry into the New York City Marathon this year (it cost $150, compared to $295 to run in the actual marathon; they also got a finisher medal but no finisher shirt). For guaranteed entry into the 2020 Brooklyn Half Marathon, runners can sign up for and complete each of six virtual races, at $20 per race. They also get access to a virtual trainer as part of their fee.

The Running Bubble Has Popped. (You Couldn’t Hear It in New York.) - The New York Times

“Back when you could enter a road race for $10 and you could enter a marathon for $25, the sport really had no appeal or very little appeal for for-profit businesses,” Stewart said. “But then we moved into an era where people would pay $85 for a half and $135 for a marathon. That’s when you really had all the for-profit groups, and it just transformed the model.” Stewart specifically cited the Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon race series, which put a heavy focus on the social experience of running events and charged high prices for it. (Fees for races in its 2017 Las Vegas race series are $79.99 for the 5K up to $179.99 for the marathon.)

Google's Improbable Deal to Recreate the Real World in VR | WIRED

Improbable offers a new way of building virtual worlds, including not just immersive games à la Second Life or World of Warcraft, but also vast digital simulations of real cities, economies, and biological systems. The idea is that these virtual worlds can run in a holistic way across a practically infinite network of computers, so that they can expand to unprecedented sizes and reach new levels of complexity.

Architectural virtuality

"At its core is a multi-agent architecture for a cognitive environment created by IBM Watson Research Center to link human experience with technology. In CISL, we created this architecture to integrate technologies that register different kinds of human behavior captured by sensors as individual events and forward them to the cognitive agents behind the scene for interpretation. Enhancing this architecture will allow us to link new sensing technologies and computer vision technologies into the system, and to enable collaborative decision making tools on top of these technologies."

Spinning Goes to the Movies at ImaxShift - The New York Times

“Your legs are burning and you are sweating, but you are focused on this beautiful scene in front of you that you are so enraptured by,” she said. It helped that she found herself cycling through scenes of places she had visited in person. “You are transported to another world, driving through the streets of Paris or going up a hill in Dubai.”

I Finally Found My Motivation - And Ran from Paris to Amsterdam! | Eat Smart, Move More, Weigh LessEat Smart, Move More, Weigh Less

After 5 years of hunkering down into my non-running funk, I finally discovered my magic bullet: virtual racing.

Virtual reality helped improve nerve function in paralysed people

"In virtually every one of these patients, the brain had erased the notion of having legs. You're paralysed, you're not moving, the legs are not providing feedback signals." said Professor Nicolelis, he went on to say: "By using a brain-machine interface in a virtual environment, we were able to see this concept gradually re-emerging into the brain."

Instagram and mindfulness

One of the parts of meditation is actually being aware of your surroundings… Sometimes taking a photo, looking down at it, editing it, adding a caption, whatever, actually makes you appreciate the moment that you’re in, it makes you stop and say, ‘That sunset is beautiful.’ So I’m not entirely sure that it takes you out of the moment. I wonder if it actually has the opposite feeling, which is making you more present.

What's the 'real' context for friendship? (Is FB year round now?)

A commemorative friend is not someone you expect to hear from, or see, maybe ever again. But they were important to you at an earlier time in your life, and you think of them fondly for that reason, and still consider them a friend. Facebook makes things weird by keeping these friends continually in your peripheral vision. It violates what I’ll call the camp-friend rule of commemorative friendships: No matter how close you were with your best friend from summer camp, it is always awkward to try to stay in touch when school starts again. Because your camp self is not your school self, and it dilutes the magic of the memory a little to try to attempt a pale imitation at what you had.