Discussion: Goals

I like your goals! For point (1), as I'm sure you're aware, different types of meat have different carbon footprints. Perhaps your goal could reflect that? For instance, you could set a carbon budget (say), and therefore beef and lamb (sorry) would be costlier.

Python is also excellent; it's the language of choice for a lot of deep learning libraries like keras and pytorch. I have found that R is more common in the bioinformatics community. Between the two, I prefer python - and much of the knowledge is transferrable between them, though not the syntax.

I was aware that different meats have different carbon footprints. Most of my meat consumption is poultry already, which is one of the lower ones. I hadn't seen those stats on cheese before, though. They make me sad.

Setting a carbon budget would definitely be a more accurate way of doing things, but it's just hard to imagine keeping that careful track of what I'm eating on any kind of meaningful timeline. I think having a class of meals (dinner) where I eat meat and a class of meals (breakfast and lunch) where I don't eat meat is pretty achievable, while generally keeping track of all my meat consumption seems less achievable for me.

As for the bioinformatics, python is a pretty obvious choice for me. Most of the in house analysis programs I'm using are written in python, I already know some python, and the people I'm most likely to bother when I get stuck are more proficient in python :-).

Learn as you go.
Read something before sleep for 30min:
https://effectivepython.com/ (I didn't read it, but Addison-Wesley usually is very good)

Thanks!

Greg really enjoyed the Flume Trail Half if you need any extra motivation for that one. All the climb is at the beginning then you get to the flat section with pretty views!

I've never done the Yosemite half, but I did the Grand Canyon half with the same company- lots of fun! I liked it because it was the only one of their races that was almost entirely on trail, so if you're looking for something with less pavement, the Flume trail half looks pretty awesome.

The Yosemite half is the half that killed my quads a couple years ago because it’s a lot of downhill on pavement. It was fun but I couldn’t walk for a couple days after

Thanks for all the input! I'm leaning strongly towards doing the Flume Trail Half and not doing the Yosemite Half. The Flume Trail Half looks extremely awesome, is on trails, and I completely approve of getting all the climb over in the beginning :-). I was excited about the Yosemite Half because the pictures made it look like it finished in Yosemite valley, which seemed like a good way to finish a race but when I actually looked at the course map, it turns out it's not even in the park...