Question of the Week
What the hell happened to the weekend?
Sorry. I’m having a bear of a time catching back up, here, and I haven’t been running at 100% brain power for some time now, for reasons I’ll explain below. So today I figured I’d get at least something up and go through the massive backlog of links to cool things to share with you. So, yes, it’s Monday, but it’s a Saturday-style post; sort of blogging training-wheels until I can ride all by myself again. Yes, I know the old adage is “like riding a bike” to mean something one never forgets, so perhaps that wasn’t the best analogy to use, but let’s pretend that in this situation I suffered cerebellar damage or something like that. Or an inner ear infection. The point is, lack of coordination. Which is like not being able to write… good.
Hey, look at this! It’s a video interview of Conan O’Brien at Google I found via Neatorama!
There, now go watch Conan make teh funny for 48 solid minutes. That sort of makes up for my absence, right? A little?
Graph of the Week
Okay, folks, it’s time I admit something: I’m overweight. And I need to do something about it. In late spring of 2008 I was running 20+ miles per week and I weighed about 190 pounds. I’m 6′ 3″ (that’s 191 cm for you folks outside the US) and fairly broad-shouldered so that’s actually a very healthy weight for me. Since then my fitness has devolved to fatness, though:
That includes 5 vacations I’ve taken since then (the last of which being the time off including my hiatus from here) and two holiday seasons, the result of which was gaining over 30 pounds in 2 years. Not good. You’ll note that I’ve done nothing but pack on the pounds throughout 2010, too, whereas in between vacations I’d normally manage to drop a couple pounds or at least break even. This is because of writing here.
Oh, don’t worry, I don’t blame you, dear reader. You see, I’ve very much enjoyed writing this blog and I wanted to continue it as best I could. Unfortunately, this required taking up the free time I’d have normally spent exercising. Furthermore, since I’m mildly hypoglycemic and I struggle with being the clever witticism-generating machine you’ve come to know me as when I have low blood sugar, I wanted to keep my brain floating in as much ATP as it wanted as I was focused on writing here the first 5 months. The result of both was a healthy and happy brain but a body that got winded walking to my car. Which I’d then drive to KFC. To get a Double Down. Which would make it worse.
And so, when I returned from our vacation a couple of weeks ago, I weighed 221 pounds. I’d lost not one but two notches on my belt, which is leather and therefore was probably stretching some, anyway. Even my fat pants were tight and the majority of the rest of my pants didn’t fit at all unless I fancied rupturing my kidneys. I needed to go on a diet. And so, as of June 1, I have. It’s sort of a variation on the Public Humiliation Diet (hence this), with the exception that I do not weigh myself daily as I find it to be counter-productive, but rather shoot for 5-day intervals. This will go on for 30 days and then I’ll switch to 10-day intervals for weigh-ins. Results thus far are as follows:
So that’s a good start, I think. I’m running 16 miles per week now and I’m watching what I eat and curtailing (though not eliminating) my alcoholic beverage intake. It seems to be working so far. The trouble is that it has taken my body some time to adjust to the lower caloric intake and greater exercise and so, in addition to not having as much time to write as I’ve gone jogging more (not that I could have done much with a broken laptop last week, anyway), the hunger pangs and desire to KILL EVERYTHING THAT MAKES ME SO ANGRY WHICH IS EVERYTHING EVER that is associated with low blood sugar for me has left me struggling to relate the wonderful world of Science to you as I would like to. My body is grudgingly coming to terms with this regimen, though, and so I hope I can start producing some more quality material in the near future. Until then, here are some links:
Links of the Week
- The 5 Most Famous Musicians Who are Thieving Bastards. As big of a deal intellectual property law is these days, it’s pretty dismaying to see how many successful musicians crossed the line between “adapting” and “stealing” in some of their more famous songs. I gotta come down on Cracked for not including Coldplay in the list but perhaps they felt it was unnecessary as everyone knows they’re rip-off artists.
- The Prague Pneumatic Post. Apparently, pneumatic tubes were all the rage for postal delivery in major cities in the late 19th/early 20th century and Prague continued to use theirs until just recently. On a scale of 1 to Very Steampunk this registers about a 12.
- Isolated Settlements at the Ends of the Earth. Who knew Antarctica would be such a prime location for urban exploration?
- No, Seriously, Why is the Sky Blue? Best part: the sky wasn’t always blue, even when there was life on Earth.
- Celebrating 50,000 Generations of the Long-Term Lines. Richard Lenski’s lab has been carrying out an experiment with E. coli called the Long-Term Evolution Experiment in order to show evolution in action in bacteria under controlled laboratory settings. So far the experiment has been going on for some 50,000 generations, which, if it were run on humans, would have taken in the ballpark of a million years. Not bad for one experiment [Ed: a word of warning - there is a Wikipedia entry on the LTEE but it is often heavily vandalized by anti-evolution thugs and other ne'er-do-wells with little else better to do than deface websites that present them with uncomfortable facts].
’)
delicious