Month: March 2006

Technology Rant Continued

A while back, I hit on why it’s not an awful thing that science and engineering jobs, etc, are getting moved offshore.

Surfing back through a couple of old links I’d saved, I found this Reason interview with Neal Stephenson, who has way to much of my mindshare for a living mortal. (and if the idea of a “Reason” interview doesn’t get you chuckling, please go read Snow Crash). In any case, part of it focuses on how abandoning the model of science and engineering driving the economy isn’t unprecedented –

If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It’s no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you’re living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.

It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

The common theme is that control shifts over to the next group once a challenge is conquered. The pioneers figured out how to move from the post-iron age to the industrial age on a large scale, without the inefficiencies of kings and royalties. The plutocrats figured out how to manage manpower and capital on large scales. The technical class – well, crap, what didn’t they figure out?

Not that there’s not still technical work to be done; however, the biggest transformations that need to take place in the next 50 years are in mindset – how do we urge adoption of efficient energy technologies? How do we manage increasing urbanization and still fulfil basic human needs to create and build? How do we communicate; find people who share our ideas, ideals, wishes and dreams? And how do we negotiate with other groups without resorting to blowing them up?

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Swim

Managed to drag myself to the pool this evening after scrubbing the bathrooms ’cause my mom’s showing up tomorrow. I even picked up my room. Funny how, even with kids of your own, your mom can make you feel twelve when you don’t see her so often.

The pool was wet. The pool was cold. C, my erstwhile swimming partner, decided to stay at home and eat chocolate. Something about wanting to get off early this weekend. Tall guy stood me up, too – this is like a week without seeing him at the pool.

The first 500 yards were good. Second were pretty good, too, but there was the feeling at the back of my mind that something wasn’t quite right. Probably wanted to get home to clean something. Started the third 500, and at the end felt really winded. Fourth 500 – pushed off the wall to get going, and just decided to bag it right there.

So, I didn’t make my workout goals, but I also didn’t push myself into extremis. I’d be upset, but I’ve gotten off of the couch three days in a row. There’s something to be said for that. Though I wish I’d snuck in a run on Tuesday.

Sorry – nothing earth-shattering tonight. Maybe Friday.

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Mooooore things the RBF could’a told you

Researchers have shown that Chocolate Milk works well as a recovery beverage.

Joel M. Stager, Ph.D., professor of kinesiology at Indiana University, said “Chocolate milk contains an optimal carbohydrate to protein ratio, which is critical for helping refuel tired muscles after strenuous exercise and can enable athletes to exercise at a high intensity during subsequent workouts.”

I’ve indirectly pushed moo juice here and here, not only for recovery but for weight loss, too. Plus, it just tastes great.

Which brings up something that’s been nagging at me for a couple of months. I started an as-yet unpublished exploration of how to set up a project to re-evaluate running and fitness memes by mining the blogs on the RBF. We’re somewhere north of 500 blogs, or a potential half of a person-millenium of raw data each year on real-life fitness. The advantage I’d see in mining RBF data as opposed to studies is that we’re essentially using real people, with real commitments, existing health issues, and lives to gather data on fitness, weight loss, injury and recovery, diet, etc. Most of the studies that current fitness wisdom is based on, like the one that Dr. Stager did, uses either groups of college atheletes or other easily identifiable controls to develop theories.

What I’d like to do, were I tech-savvy with a couple of weeks on my hand, would be to set up a flexible fitness correlary to Wikipedia, a place where we could list the various theories on weight loss or marathon training, for instance, and then tie them back to revelant real-world data. Answer questions like “What works for treating ITB syndrome?”, etc.

We’ve run the tests. We have the data. There’s an opportunity to re-write or confirm basic ideas about health, fitness, and going from a couch potato to a runner/cyclist/swimmer/whatever. Call it an “Open-Source Fitness” process; merge it with the work that the Cross-Fitters have been doing, whatever.

So somebody, please – write this up as a grant. Get yourself six months of funding and a new MacBook Pro out of the deal. Let us know things we’ve already told ourselves.

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One for me, and one for my Hobbitt

Warning! Spoilers for 24 follow.

What a day! Finally got some product out the door at work, though I don’t know how it’s going to be received. Read the boy his story. Turned in some library books (Is it just me, or is a good local public library the absolute greatest? Thank you, Groton Public Library. Flexible hours rock.) Caught the last half hour of work night at the church. Dragged the trash and recycling to the curb.

And finally climbed back on the stationary trainer to watch 24. It’s been a couple of weeks since I haven’t screwed up the VCR (if anyone wants to send me the parts to hack together a MythTV, I’d be happy to blog it), so I’m like 4 hours behind. Thankfully, the world is still about to end, and Keifer Sutherland still looks like he wants to kill someone. The President’s wife was still alive, so I’m guessing that the President called off the assassination of the Russian Premier. The terrorists were still mad, but I’m guessing they would have double-crossed the pres if he’d let them whack the Russians. ‘Else they would have had to rename the show “12”.

Big body count in tonight’s episode – Edgar, the chunky hacker bites it in a poison gas attack on CTU. Then the hobbit bites it. Which is kind of bad; I’d come to identify with his character – chunky public servant, handsom as all get-out, sharp as a tack. Sucks in a lungful of gas after saving the rest of the folks at CTU. There are worse ways to go.

45 minutes later, I climbed off the trainer. Thought briefly about doing Pilates, but then bed started calling.

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Monday mini-brick

AM – Pushups and Situps. I really, really need to do this more.

Lunch – run 30 minutes with HR about 140. 15 min out, 14 min back, probably 3.3 miles. Two telephone poles further than either of the 30 minute runs I did last week, which was encouraging.

After bathtime – 2000 yards at the pool with C, the not-so-new anymore engineer that did the Tris with me last summer. It’s kind of nice to have a training partner. Not that we’re pushing each other or anything, but just knowing that there’s going to be someone else at the pool is incentive not to slack.

Weight – still at 174 this morning. However, I hit 169.5 on Friday morning. I wasn’t the most responsible eater over the weekend, so I’m guessing reality is somewhere in between. I really need to get diligent about counting calories. When I do it, the pounds come off.

Tomorrow AM – run. Tomorrow after work – bike. (both gentle, 140 BPM for about 30 minutes). Tomorrow Evening – I read a week’s worth of other fitness blogs.

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Hiatus Weekend Wrap-up

In the interest in do-ing instead of watching, I passed on watching NCAA conference playoff basketball this weekend. Yeah, I know. Sacrilege, and all.

See, Jake’s been taking this “Mad Science” class after school, kind of like the Discovery Channel, ‘cept live – they get a science-y toy each week. Two weeks ago – model rockets. Life size and everything. Having been a rocket buff as a boy myself, and with Saturday being one of the beautiful early spring days that should be etched in every child’s mind as perfection itself, so we slapped together some sammiches, and I trundled the kids into the SuperWagon. Told the wife not to miss us too much (She said “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out”), and heighed us ho to the local hobby shop.

Groton’s got probably the last remaining actual, honest-to-god Hobby Shop I’ve seen in a long time. Electric trains in at least three scales (Lionel, HO, and really small), every kind of plastic model you might want with paint of every shade from North Africa kacki to Bright Metallic Cherry, RC planes boats and automobiles, and rocket engines from 1/2A2T’s to ginormous D-14 boosters. We snagged an upgraded launch pad, and a package of my favorite C6-3 engines (plenty big to put a rocket on the edge of vision).

Zipped down to Haley Farms (Bluff Point’s sister park), and found a decent clearing mostly aligned with the ground winds. Set up in the corner to give us a long fetch to recover the rocket. Set up the pad, put in the engine, backed up, counted down, and …

nothing.

10 minutes later, I figured out that I’d put half the batteries in backwards. Managed not to swear.

Counted down. Pushed the button and

WOW! I’d forgotten exactly how cool it is to play with explosives and to shoot things way, way high into the air. The rocket arced majestically into the blue, heading back over the forest to compensate for the wind. At its apogee, the ejection charge popped a little white puff of smoke, the nose cone came off, and the parachute opened just as pretty as a picture.

And I started to panic ’cause I’d forgotten the standard rocket hack of cutting the center out of the parachute. See, model rockets are usually pretty light, and cutting the center out of the parachute means that they come down a little quicker, and don’t blow into the next county.

The rocket floated beautifully, parachute blown up like a pillow, drifting on the wind, shiny and perfect. Floated down on a warm spring breeze as I sprinted across the field, hoping beyond hope that I’d be able to catch the rocket before it touched down. However, it was not to be. After running about 200 yards, I realized that Jake was about to learn lesson #1 of model rocketry – that building rockets beats the snot out of losing them in trees, or in his case, watching it splash down and drift gently out to sea.

Yep – first rocket my son builds, I splash down in 35 degree water on an outgoing tide. D’oh.

Jake wasn’t far behind me, and when I turned to him, he knew something was up. I picked him up and pointed to the rocket sinking under the water, 50 yards offshore.

“Can’t we go get someone with a boat to go get it? Can’t you go wade out to it” Tears welled up in his beautiful blue eyes.

No, I explained, and he asked “Why?” ‘Cause daddy’s got a weakness for buying engines too big for a new field and new rockets. But we learned something, right? “What?” That sometimes things go wrong even when we try to make them right – I’d explained to him about why we set up where we did, etc.

His tears were dry by the time we made it back to the launch pad and his younger brother, and we were making plans to build and launch another kit I’ve got at the house. Live and learn.

I suppose I should feel guiltier than I do, but, MAN, was that one shot cool. I’d forgotten how high they’d go…

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Big Ideas – Do

Reading through Wired’s “Rants and Raves” today (Second Item), I caught a bit that really clicked with me:

I am weaning myself from the (media – movies, TV, copyrighted music) addiction: I don’t watch television (at all — no cable, never will) and use my Netflix account less and less. Sure it’s extreme, but I use the time to read with my daughters, take walks with my wife and think on life a bit. Heck, I don’t know where I’d find time for TV. I have found I like “doing” much more than “watching.”

It’s kind of a mental response to the “Fast Food Nation” syndrome. As a lot of the RBF is discovering, the only barrier to improving fitness is getting one’s butt out the door. I’m guessing that the correlary is that the only barrier to doing pretty much anything you want is (picking up a pencil, going to the library, dusting off the camera, asking for help…). Go meet your neighbors (something I still need to work on)

I’m still working on “doing” more than “watching”. Luckily, it’s a self-reinforcing feedback.

The more expensive and restrictive existing media industries make mass-produced content, the more satisfied we will be with brew-your-own. What’s waiting inside you?
(And again, it’s a shameless ripoff of Brogan’s “Big Idea” meme. While I’m at it, this impacted directly a project at work. Thanks)

So, why are you here

And not over reading Fat Cyclist’s Tour Day France predictions?

He picks Ullrich overall (I think). From his description of Alexander Vinokourov:

  (E)very cycling fan — regardless of how strongly they idolize any other cyclist — must stand at the ready to cheer for Vinokourov as he makes one of his crazy, wrong-headed attacks. Most of them make no sense and go nowhere, and that’s why I love him. Here’s how I imagine Vinokourov decides whether to attack at a given moment: “Hey, there’s a guy about 100 feet ahead of me. I wonder if I could catch him. Well, my legs feel pretty good. GO!”

So, seriously. Go. Don’t forget to click on an ad link while you’re there to add to the Fat Cyclist Sweepstakes.
And, Fat Cyclist? Man, if you can’t make a phat living writing as well as you do, there’s no justice in the world. Hope the move goes well. Here’s wishing you miles and miles of singletrack and no punctures.