Slashdot Mirror

This sounds a lot like the Unicard.

We already had a mass produced, succesfull, and very cheap launcher. Suborbital, sure - but while orbit requires from rocket an order or magnitude more work, the logistics & manufacturing aren't that dissimilar...

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html

Sadly, the lesson was forgotten. Until now?

Here's a good read.

and avoid oil spills on the moon. We just jammed up gulf of Mexico, avoid covering with tar palus Putredinis

Geez people. Don't go spouting opinions about color if you've never taken a graphics course.

The range of colors that humans can see is bigger than the color produced by any three-color display. No matter which three colors you use. For example see a chromaticity diagram here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/specrend/ (scroll down to the image labeled "chromaticy coordinates"). This diagram shows what colors the average human can see (if you ignore brightness; brown for example isn't shown). The three primaries in a typical RGB display are shown, and the colors they can produce lie inside a triangle. The triangle is clearly smaller than the tongue-shaped region of perceivable colors (though the effect is exaggerated because the diagram isn't perceptually uniform, but the point still stands). You can't fit a triangle inside a round region without leaving parts of the round region uncovered.

That's why having more than three primaries will give you more colors: with four primaries, you can cover a quadrilateral-shaped portion of the tongue (unless you're stupid and pick a fourth color inside the RGB triangle). Most likely the display in TFA uses a different G primary from the usual one, because adding a Yellow primary around 580nm wouldn't extend the triangle out by much. I imagine the four primaries used have dominant wavelengths of around 610nm (Red), 570nm (Yellow-green), 500nm (Blue-green), and 490nm (Blue). There will still be colors you can't produce with a 4-primary display.

As some people have mentioned, your eye adjusts to the device's gamut, and your brain will "fill in" colors that the device can't produce. The brain does this magic all the time: you "see" the color of a rose as the being the same, under many different lighting conditions.

One problem the Sharp display will run into is that the TV signal comes from cameras with only three (RGB) primaries. The display must be taking each RGB pixel, converting it to CIE XYZ coordinates, tweaking those coordinates to push the signal into the gamut region that the new display can produce, and then producing 4 values from the original 3. So the colors you see are ficticious: you can't get 4 numbers from 3 without guessing (the fancy word for "guess" is "extrapolation").

ALejo Hausner

We had a system quit working that had not been modified in years. Upon investigation the problem was found in a Perl script. The date on file was years in the past. The error was due to a change to a single character and the character was changed by one bit. Someone suggested that this was caused by an "Oh-My-God" particle interaction - who knows?
   

For a "realistic" trip to nearby stars, that means an extra day and a half out of the 4.37 years to get to Alpha Centauri

Only when measured on a clock/calendar that is not experiencing acceleration and is at rest with respect to the two stars. An Earth-based observer, despite experiencing accelerations and not being at rest, is a good approximation (her clock will run a few milliseconds a day slow compared to the idealized observer).

However, the people inside the ship experience what they perceive as a Lorentz contraction of the distance to their destination. The distance is exponentially shortened as the relativistic speed limit is approached. The effect of this is that measuring by their own shipboard clocks the trip would take a lot less time at 0.99999998c than 0.99c. (The people on Earth and in orbit around Alpha Centauri would still think the rocket trip takes about 4.37 years, although the Earth observer would not know this until twice that time had elapsed). These observers would consider the clocks onboard the relativistic spaceship to have experienced a Lorentz time dilation, and also the ship itself (and any rulers onboard) would be length contracted.

A special relativity treatment of this using the Lorentz-Fitzgerald formula is here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/lorentz.html which is entirely accurate if you ignore accelerations experienced by the spacecraft.

Unfortunately for a classical object with the mass of a spaceship general relativistic effects become harder to ignore as one approaches c, since the increasing mass-energy-momentum nontrivially influences the stress and pressure terms in the Einstein stress-energy tensor, which alters not only the geodesics of nearby classical objects (i.e., the high mass-energy causes the fast ship to develop a strong gravitational field) but also slows its onboard clocks (relative to the Earth and Alpha Centauri observers' clocks) too (and also shortens onboard rulers from those observers' perspectives too). That's OK, it makes the trip even shorter, but it also creates a rather nasty gravitational potential gradient that rapidly becomes unignorable at scales less than the size of the ship (so it would probably rip apart tidally). Also, any infalling objects would develop energy through gravitational time dilation (i.e., infalling photons blueshift, infalling electrons gain kinetic energy, etc.).

In short:

SR: high relative velocity -> length contraction
GR: high acceleration and high momentum -> length contraction

length contraction ~ time dilation (shorter trip, but also increases in frequencies of incoming particles and ensembles (i.e., incoming cold things are measured as hotter as you experience Lorentz contraction))

http://www.fourmilab.ch/images/venus_daytime/

Not sure. This guy seems to think so: http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html

But in WWII, I'm not sure the launch crew, builders and the designers etc were paid much in salaries ;).

And the V2 didn't really have much in terms of controls. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2#Technical_details
Had much lower performance etc.

Even if they can do it cheaper they'll just charge slightly lower than the competition :).

There's an article1 about the military version of the Soviet Salyut space station, which flew as Salyuts 3 and 5 between 1974 and 1977.
Virtually no information was available about the military Salyuts until recently, when access was opened up to a full-scale training model at the Moscow Aviation Institute. Well, guess what--Salyut 3 had a machine gun. The station had a 23 mm rapid-fire cannon mounted on the outside, along the long axis of the station "for defence against US space-based inspectors/interceptors".

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/spaceguns/

so the net change is that you'll have a harder time telling you've been snooped on

It's also easier to hide things you don't want to be seen. GMail can turn over your emails, but if they're encrypted, even with something simple, it will be harder to make it useful. How many secret messages I have hidden in the pictures I email around or post online? Who has the resources to check every one?

Searches can be masked using TOR and private browsing. Again, not bullet proof, but it doesn't have to be. Just enough to poison the data and make it unreliable. Go buy a pre-paid phone with cash and take the battery out of your regular cell phone at random intervals. You're not trying to create a smoke screen, just sow doubt.

That's if you're worried about it.

Law enforcement may think search data and social media information is some kind of lucky charm, but it's pretty easy to spoil that data, leave false trails and really easy to hide things. If they gain confidence catching stupid people, all the better for those with a little clue.

Really, why did everybody forget about A-4 rocket? (aka V-2)

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html

I've always wondered where John Walker got his idea. Now I know he was just imitating Ed Lu! Edward Lu is a Fucking Genius!

a few advancements in ion propulsion or vacuum propellers,

Although the vacuum propeller has actually been patented, according to Wikipedia, it doesn't really exist. However, by following one of the external links, I get the impression it's right up there next to the Electric Universe in terms of generating useful information. That is, it's extraordinarily unlikely.

None of the technology to do this is very far-fetched at all, but we just aren't willing to spend the money.

Your hold on reality seems a tad weak. I'd strongly advise turning off the TV for a while and make sure you get outside on a regular basis.

Actually that's a good point. If you want to colonise the galaxy with machines you don't need to hurry.

However I looked up the figures for a 1g spacecraft and you could make a 10 year ship time (24 years time on Earth) round trip to Sirius.

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/O/one-g_spacecraft.html

That's not so bad - you could probably put the crew into suspended animation. Or you could build an ecosphere on board that was self sustaining. Neither of these things are technically feasible right now of course, but neither of them seem to contradict any known physical principles.

I.e. a quantum propeller - a devices that generates thrust without expelling mass - provided it could give 1g acceleration which admittedly is rather a lot - could give you V style spacecraft.

Of course, there's still an issue of energy to power it. Presumably you need to carry something to generate that, unless you could mine it out of the vacuum or something similarly elegant. This last possibility is more speculative obviously.

"Ohoy! Them quantum propellers deliver a fierce thrust, matey!"

Red this short article about "vacuum propellers" (props to RedJesus for finding the article):

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/vprop/

You don't have to "emit" anything, you just set up magnetic fields to push against the "vacuum" of space, which is not at all a true, classical vacuum (it contains little fields all over the place). It's like the ocean, a force that can be interacted with. A "working fluid".

And since we're talking electromagnetism, a really strong force in the grand scheme of things, maybe this will be a lot of energy efficient that simply throwing almost-massless particles out your rear.

John Walker called such a device a vacuum propeller. He didn't have any particular ideas about how the device would work, but he does have a nice analogy involving propellers.

The article Red Jesus linked is critical. It helped me understand the whole point of this Story. I know I shouldn't RTFA, but I couldn't help it this time.

John Walker called such a device a vacuum propeller. He didn't have any particular ideas about how the device would work, but he does have a nice analogy involving propellers.

Pfft, that's only pseudo random data, why settle when you can get true random data.

https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/secure_generate.html
https://www.random.org/passwords/

Uhm, no:

Wrong. E=MC^2 is simple to deduce; read Einstein's Theory of Relativity, downloadable from Project Gutenberg. Special theory talks about dropping a ball from a moving train; general (the E=MC^2 one) talks about a man in a closed box with a string on the outside, and something pulling the string, and the forces the man experiences. The rest is just math, and fairly simple math at that.

Orthographically, E = mc^2, or more formally (as the relativistic energy-momentum relationship in Poincaré Einstein Planck form) E^2 - (pc)^2 = (m_0c^2)^2, was introduced in his special relativity paper, "Is the trajectorial inertia of a body dependent on its energy content?" ("Ist die Treagheit eines Koerpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhaengig"?) published in 1905, an English translation of which can be found here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/E_mc2/www/ [in the first equation -- note that l is used for E, and v is used for p and in the usual form today sets cos theta = 1 and rearranges the power terms]

The special theory of relativity elucidated a post-Newtonian mechanics which works against a coordinate set of 3 spatial dimensions and one timelike dimension in which Euclid's geometry postulates always held true in all the spatial dimensions, and the timelike dimension could by rotation become a spatial dimension with another spatial dimension becoming a timelike one, thus demonstrating an equivalence of length and time (i.e., allowing c to be a ruler in spatial and timelike dimensions).

Careful testing of the special theory of relativity revealed that the space-time geometry of the observable universe is *not* Euclidean, with the deviation from Euclidean "flatness" proportional to the gravitational potential at the point in space-time under study.

Einstein was able to develop several nonlinear equations that create a space-time which is flat locally (i.e., physical experiments are reproducible with the same results (required by Galilean relativity *and* by existing Einsteinean relativity) and local geometry will extremely closely approximate Euclidean geometry. (The latter is not too surprising since you can closely reproduce Euclidean geometry at small local scales on the surface of the Earth, which is so gently curved that you do not detect the non-flatness of your floor or desk). However non-local geometry can appear obviously non-Euclidean. By rotation of the dimensions, local timing appears to pass at one second per second, but remote timing of events in a different gravitational potential may pass slower or faster similar to how Lorentz contraction works in the case of observations involving relativistic speeds in special relativity.

The rocket-isolation room shows that gravitation works as an acceleration; there is an equivalent effect felt by the experimenter when he is in a sealed room at mean sea level as when the same sealed room is in a rocket ship being accelerated by about 9.8 m/s^2 -- with good insulation (no windows, for instance) there is no distinguishing between acceleration from the Earth's mass versus acceleration from the rocket engine.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/subsection1_1_1_0_3.html

"Whether you've always been overweight, have been on a roller coaster of dieting and regaining, or have just recently added some excess poundage, the key resources you need to achieve and maintain whatever weight and health goals you set for yourself are the same as you need to accomplish anything else worthwhile in life:

        * An eye firmly fixed on the goal.
        * Will power.
        * A high tolerance for pain."

The problem is most people don't have two out of three of those requirements.

Bullshit. I've lost 26 pounds last year over the course of 7 months, and have not regained them in the 12 months since I reached my chosen weight (and I see no reason this should change). I now oscillate by 2 pounds around my chosen weight, depending on whether I'm indulging in some rich tasty food for a couple of days, or make a slight effort to go back to my chosen weight.

Losing 26 pounds wasn't that hard by the way (thankfully). I reduced or stopped the obvious bad habits (soda and pastry at noon every day, too rich breakfast, too many restaurants), monitored my weight (the most important part), did some light exercice (to ensure the few muscles I had would not disappear during the diet), and that's it. I was helped by the fact that I had quite a lot of work to do at the same time, so I could concentrate on it and forget the slight hunger I sometimes felt.

You should read The Hacker's Diet.

The Hackers Diet makes it clear: Exercise just doesn't burn that many calories. You can lose weight just by eating less calories than you burn, no exercise required.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html

Interesting idea. The baguette isn't a huge deal because it won't delay the activation of the Collider but that's only one of the absurd things to happen to it, many of which have caused delays.

If the sheer number of alternate universes is contributing to our survival
and each time we avoid destruction, the number of universes is reduced
then perhaps it would benefit us to seed the multiverse with more universes.

I'm going to be letting HotBits make my decisions for a while. They supply random numbers based on radioactive decay. I'm hoping my experiment will propagate superposition to the macro world and increasing the chance that some instance of me survives whatever nasty unexpected consequences the LHC's activation may have.

Of course one could argue that my our present existence proof that nothing happens in the future that destroys this universe's past.

We can either choose to fight them with our microbes over there, or be forced to fight them with our microbes here.

You got me curious, so I fired up my copy of ENT and ran those two strings through it to see exactly how much entropy is contained therein.

'The Lord of the Rings is the Greatest Series Ever Written': 3.898965 bits of entropy per byte. Chi square distribution for 58 samples is 1238.79, and randomly would exceed this value less than 0.01 percent of the time (typo in the output corrected). Arithmetic mean value of the data bytes is 89.8448 (where 127.5 would be considered random). The Monte Carlo value for Pi is 4.0000000000 (error 27.32 percent). The serial correlation coefficient is -0.096773 (where being totally uncorrelated would equal 0.0).

'TLotRitGSER': 3.251629 bits of entropy per byte. Chi square distribution for 12 samples is 329.33, and randomly would exceed this value less than 0.12 percent of the time (typo in the output corrected again). Arithmetic mean value of the data bytes is 83.7500 (where 127.5 would be considered random). The Monte Carlo value for Pi is 4.0000000000 (error 27.32 percent). The serial correlation coefficient is 0.109522 (where being totally uncorrelated would equal 0.0).

So, if you're going by bits of entropy in the passphrase alone, go with the full sentence.

What it comes down to is that if we want to make sure critical information is kept around in case civilization crashes, we'd better keep the important stuff on paper.

That didn't help much the last time civilization fell. The classical world used papyrus and other kinds of paper extensively, yet the vast majority of what they wrote was lost by the time of the Renaissance. We'd know nothing of Aristotle without a few fortunate translations that served as backups.

The classical texts we do have were preserved by repeated copying, not through the durability of a particular physical copy. The same applies to the digital world. You can't beat off-site backups.

The device sounds interesting but the reporter's notion of gravity is utter nonsense.

Huh? The description you quote seems like a pretty reasonable qualitative description of an astrophysical black hole to me. Black holes have a region of capture orbits outside the horizon, where nearby matter spirals inwards.

Not that astrophysical black holes have anything whatsoever to do with the electromagnetic devices referred to in the article, of course.

Darn skippy it's a great book, and I don't mean "a great book for its time", I mean that the works of Wells remain as superbly well written and thought provoking books even today.

If you haven't read them, then close this tab and do so right now. If you need convincing that Wells is One Of Us, then consider he also wrote the first (published) wargame rules: Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books.

To Mr W. was broached the idea: "I believe that if one set up a few obstacles on the floor, volumes of the British Encyclopedia and so forth, to make a Country, and moved these soldiers and guns about, one could have rather a good game, a kind of kriegspiel."...

Primitive attempts to realise the dream were interrupted by a great rustle and chattering of lady visitors. They regarded the objects upon the floor with the empty disdain of their sex for all imaginative things.

Doesn't it make you want to clench a pipe in your teeth, and strangle a prostitute? Stirring stuff.

If you just want to track weight loss, the Hacker's Dietonline weight tracker is great. It's by John Walker (one of he creaters of AutoCad)

One of the things that can be discouraging when losing weight is the daily fluctuations. The Hacker's Diet log software provides a nice weighted average so even if you gain a bit (say, 180.5 one day and 181.2 the next) you can see that the trend is still downwards.

There's also excel sheets with macros for those of you dislike the idea of putting your weight info into the cloud.

NOTE: The diet itself is crap - get your actual diet elsewhere. In fact, diet is a horrible term - think of it as a lifestyle change: Less bad food. More good running.

If you just want to track weight loss, the Hacker's Dietonline weight tracker is great. It's by John Walker (one of he creaters of AutoCad)

One of the things that can be discouraging when losing weight is the daily fluctuations. The Hacker's Diet log software provides a nice weighted average so even if you gain a bit (say, 180.5 one day and 181.2 the next) you can see that the trend is still downwards.

There's also excel sheets with macros for those of you dislike the idea of putting your weight info into the cloud.

NOTE: The diet itself is crap - get your actual diet elsewhere. In fact, diet is a horrible term - think of it as a lifestyle change: Less bad food. More good running.

sound like you read the hacker's diet

That's the most extreme upper limit. Only a handful of these extremem events have been recorded. Furthermore, cosmic rays (like particles from solar wind) almost never impact you directly, unless you're in space. They interact with the atmosphere, creating showers of particles, which spread the energy over a large area. I'm not going to do the math now, but the useful figure for effecting electronics might be per square cm per year, at ground level. Most of the cross section of your computer wouldn't notice much if some ionizing radiation passed through it. The CPU and major chips are a pretty small portion of total area. The magnetic domains on your disk platters are probably large enough to be unaffected.

You can safely assume that millions of years will not have passed when traveling to a planet that is only hundreds of light years away. If you assume that only most of, say, a 1000 light year journey takes place at 0.5c (so the trip will take 2 or 3 or 4 thousand years, assuming some clever sort of acceleration is worked out), the rest frame (the planet you launched from) will only be experiencing time about 15% faster than the ship, so only 2,300, or 3,450, or 4,600 years will have passed by the time you get to the other planet (or so). This guy worked it all out and put it in a nice table:

http://ftp.fourmilab.ch/cship/timedial.html

The effect starts to get 'huge' (in my opinion) somewhere around 0.995 C. It is also noteworthy that time is actually slowing down on the ship, not going faster outside it (it isn't completely crazy to say that light never quite exists, if you think in terms of a photon's frame of reference).

This was predicted in 2003 by John Walker.
Source: http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/#MP

"Micropayment differs from existing online payment services such as PayPal and e-gold in that transaction costs are sufficiently low that extremely small payments can be made without incurring exorbitant processing fees; with micropayment it will be entirely practical for Web sites to charge visitors a ten-thousandth of a Euro to view a page; credit cards or existing online payment services have far too high overhead to permit such minuscule payments. Note that there need be no upper limit on payments made through micropayment exchanges, and hence âoemicropaymentâ simply implies that tiny payments are possible, not that larger payments aren't routinely made as well. The first broadly successful micropayment exchange is likely to be technology driven, but as micropayments become a mass market and begin to encroach on other payment facilities, pioneers in the market are likely to be acquired by major players in the financial services industry.

No more e-commerce paranoiaâ¦when you do business with vendors with certificates you consider trustworthy, you needn't enter any sensitive personal information. Just click âoebuyâ, select which of the credit cards or bank accounts linked to your certificate with which you wish to pay (never giving the number), and your purchase will be shipped to the specified address linked to your certificate. Even if your certificate is stolen, a thief can only order stuff to be shipped to you.

Each user can set their own personal default maximum price per page, per item purchased, per session, per day, per week, and per month. I call this their âoethreshold of paying.â No need to subscribe to a magazine's site to read an articleâ"just click on it and, if it costs less than your â0.05 per-item threshold and all of the other totals are within limits, up it popsâ"your account is debited and the magazine's is credited. If you're a subscriber, your certificate identifies you as one and you pay nothingâ¦and all of this happens in an instant without your needing to do anything. The magazine gets paid for what you read, so they'll put their entire content online, not just a teaser to induce you to subscribe to the printed edition. And if you like what you read, you'll return and spend more money there.

Want to start your own magazine? Decided your blog is worth â0.001 per day to read? No problemâ¦tag it with your certificate, set up a âoepay to readâ link to it, and listen to the millieuros tinkle into your virtual cookie jar.

Certified micropayment exchanges will, of course, be required to comply with âoeknow your customerâ and disclosure regulations, adhere to international conventions against money laundering, terrorism, and drug trafficking, and disclose transactions to the fiscal authorities of the jurisdiction of the buyer and seller for purposes of tax assessment. This will largely put an end to the use of the Internet for financial crimes and eliminate the need for further regulations or constraints on Internet commerce. "

More power to you. If you want a geek-friendly diet plan, I've seen people here recommend the Hacker's Diet. It's a diet with widgets!

There are a number of statistical analyses that you can run against the output of a pRNG to determine how much entropy it will generate under various usage conditions.

NIST's Randomness Test Kit

ENT

Obligatory Wikipedia entry

There's a simple random number generator based on a radioactive source on-line. That can be accessed through a Java app, and the hardware info needed to build one of your own is on line. There are commercial random number generators. USB, even. A serious data center should have a few of these.

Don't forget Stac Electronics, Microsoft fucked them over real good too on their way to the top. Then there is their history of subtlety (or overtly) fucking around with specifications specifically to cause pain to their own customers who dare to choose to use non-Microsoft products. For example the DHCP "bug" in Vista, the 500mb memory check in Windows 3.1 (which broke IBM's then-fairly-successful OS/2 for Windows product), their incompatible kerberos strategy, their undermining of Java, their web page editors that made pages look fucked up in non-IE browsers.

Microsoft has justifiably earned the hatred they receive, it's not like this aggravation with them happened for no reason.

The problem is that unless you are going to do fairly significant amounts of exercise on a daily basis, your will only burn a small number of extra calories compared to your base metabolism.

For a medium frame man, 6ft tall, you will burn through metabolism around 2059â"2574 calories without significant exercise.
http://ftp.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/rubberbag.html

An hours worth of walking will burn an additional 300 calories, swimming 500, and a hour of jogging will burn 700 calories.
http://ftp.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/exercise.html

To gain a pound of fat, you need to eat and accumulate about 3500 calories above your metabolic rate. To lose a pound of fat, you need to burn an additional 3500 calories beyond your food intake. A quick google suggests the figures for muscle are 3500 calories to gain, and 600 to burn (though not sure how accurate these are - though muscle is far denser than fat).

So to answer your question, exercise can make you lose weight, but its going to take 5 hours worth of jogging to lose a pound of fat, assuming that your weight is already stable and your food intake is balanced with your metabolic rate. An hour a day for a month, will burn about 6 pounds, but that assumes you don't get lazy and start skipping days.

However reducing your calorific intake and getting feedback by measuring the results (using a weighted average), will over a period of time, produce results with far less effort. This is what is meant by exercise is for keeping healthy, and dieting is for losing weight.

The problem is that unless you are going to do fairly significant amounts of exercise on a daily basis, your will only burn a small number of extra calories compared to your base metabolism.

For a medium frame man, 6ft tall, you will burn through metabolism around 2059â"2574 calories without significant exercise.
http://ftp.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/rubberbag.html

An hours worth of walking will burn an additional 300 calories, swimming 500, and a hour of jogging will burn 700 calories.
http://ftp.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/exercise.html

To gain a pound of fat, you need to eat and accumulate about 3500 calories above your metabolic rate. To lose a pound of fat, you need to burn an additional 3500 calories beyond your food intake. A quick google suggests the figures for muscle are 3500 calories to gain, and 600 to burn (though not sure how accurate these are - though muscle is far denser than fat).

So to answer your question, exercise can make you lose weight, but its going to take 5 hours worth of jogging to lose a pound of fat, assuming that your weight is already stable and your food intake is balanced with your metabolic rate. An hour a day for a month, will burn about 6 pounds, but that assumes you don't get lazy and start skipping days.

However reducing your calorific intake and getting feedback by measuring the results (using a weighted average), will over a period of time, produce results with far less effort. This is what is meant by exercise is for keeping healthy, and dieting is for losing weight.

I have to second that.

I like cooking, I hate cleaning afterwards. And while I like cooking, I feel that spending all that time in the kitchen daily is a waste of time.

So just make more of everything. I usually cook in batches of about 4 kg. Since I have to microwave it anyway, freezing a proper serving size is just as easy.

For work it's easy to bring. If you forget to put it in the fridge - no big deal. And most places have a microwave these days.

As for drinking, I've somehow managed to almost entirely drop cola. I'm rather surprised, because I used to think I'm addicted to the stuff. But - now I've started buying various types of squash (not the ballgame). It's cheap too. Most companies offer free coffee/tea, and the ones I've worked for have had no issues getting squash on the free list as well.

As someone above me said, The Hacker's Diet is well worth a read. Especially if you plan on losing weight, as the section on moving averages helps you keep calm.

I've lost about 2.5 kg in three weeks, and so far my biggest day to day increase was jumping 2.2 kg. The interesting big isn't what the scale says right now - it's whether or not it keeps below the moving average. This mostly isn't possible for the first few days of your diet (no data to average out), but after that it is a simple goal. Just get a decent scale and weigh yourself naked (clothes vary in weight) at the same time of day. Personally I do it after getting out of bed, before using the toilet - just keep to the same routines or your data will suffer.

I have to second that.

I like cooking, I hate cleaning afterwards. And while I like cooking, I feel that spending all that time in the kitchen daily is a waste of time.

So just make more of everything. I usually cook in batches of about 4 kg. Since I have to microwave it anyway, freezing a proper serving size is just as easy.

For work it's easy to bring. If you forget to put it in the fridge - no big deal. And most places have a microwave these days.

As for drinking, I've somehow managed to almost entirely drop cola. I'm rather surprised, because I used to think I'm addicted to the stuff. But - now I've started buying various types of squash (not the ballgame). It's cheap too. Most companies offer free coffee/tea, and the ones I've worked for have had no issues getting squash on the free list as well.

As someone above me said, The Hacker's Diet is well worth a read. Especially if you plan on losing weight, as the section on moving averages helps you keep calm.

I've lost about 2.5 kg in three weeks, and so far my biggest day to day increase was jumping 2.2 kg. The interesting big isn't what the scale says right now - it's whether or not it keeps below the moving average. This mostly isn't possible for the first few days of your diet (no data to average out), but after that it is a simple goal. Just get a decent scale and weigh yourself naked (clothes vary in weight) at the same time of day. Personally I do it after getting out of bed, before using the toilet - just keep to the same routines or your data will suffer.

There are already several intelligent posts here, about increasing activity and decreasing caloric intake. Read The Hacker's Diet for a good engineering perspective on the ins and outs (as it were).

You have a problem of insufficient activity to burn calories. I had the same problem, which has been solved by A) going to the gym, and B) standing while I work. I think the latter point here can really help you.

If you can wrangle your work space around to allow you to stand -- either by piling your computer on top of additional shelving, say -- you can burn an extra 60 calories an hour. And more, if you take that additional standing time and throw in extra movements during your work day. When standing, it's easy to just walk away for a minute, throw a ball up and down, heck, do some jumping jacks. When standing, you're that much closer to any kind of physical motion, and that has to be of help.

It's hard on your legs and knees at first, but you will build the muscles to support it. Good luck!

Cheers,
Aaron.

I agree dieting is as simple as counting calories.

(Calories Eaten - Calories burned)/3500 = weight change [lbs]

figure out how many calories you burn in a typical day, and eat less than that, the amount less than that you eat will determine how fast you lose weight.

I put on A LOT of weight when I first started working in IT and I was busy enough that I rarely made it to the gym. I THOUGHT I was eating less, and eating healthy and even tried all kinds of stupid diets that never seemed to get me anywhere. About 4 months ago I decided to look for a diet that was specifically tailored to a programmer's lifestyle (I figured there are enough smart people out there that someone must have come up with something) After about 2 minutes of searching I found The Hackers Diet. I read it and it made a lot of common sense... I decided to try it. and so far I've lost 35 lbs and I haven't set foot in a gym since I started.

in short it's just calorie counting in a way that makes good logical sense... I don't even follow the diet plan that closely, I weight myself every day so I can plot my change, and the first week I took a closer look at how many calories the foods I typically eat contain. The first few days I had some crazy hunger pains but after that I don't feel hungry anymore than usual and I the only time I even really think about how many calories I'm eating is when I break away from my normal daily eating habits (ie: family BBQ, or a party, etc.) and even then I just make a rough guess and eat a little less during my meals earlier in the day.

I still go out for ice cream, have pizza at lunch, etc. I just keep a mental tally of roughtly how many calories I'm taking in so I can adjust my other meals accordingly...

It doesn't take any time to simply not overeat.

Overeating is taking in more calories than you burn. The guy who created the company AutoDesk made this great free e-book ( he sells nothing ) for geeks to control their weight that way. It is called the Hacker's Diet:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

I have a fuel efficient system too. I used the Hacker's Diet to take off 48 lbs and I have kept most of it off for several years.

Maybe you can combine managing your calories with a brisk walk or a run for 30 minutes everyday on meal break?

Off the bat, learn to drink water, diet soda, plain tea or plain coffee while you are at work. Regular soda, tea & coffee condiments, juice, milk and sweet drinks can easily pack on weight. It only takes an extra 250 calories a day ( typical of most drinks ) to put on 52 pounds a year. Most of those other drinks easily have that many calories.

Good Luck

I recently started doing the 5 factor diet. Very easy - all you have to do is eat high glycemic index foods (unprocessed, so no flour, sugar, etc) five times a day. Eat every 3 to 3.5 hours. Exercise 5 times a week for 25 minutes.

The net effect of all of this is that your body's metabolism is set by what you eat. Call it optimizing your metabolism.

My current plan is to put the following into plastic containers:
2.5 ounces of chicken, either purchased or grilled, or whatever
3/4 to 1 cup of steamed brown rice
A few vegetables
Some meals, I'll have a few cashews so I can have a little fat in my diet.

I prepare them at most 5 days ahead of time and throw them in my refrigerator. In the morning I eat one (or prepare something more appetizing than chicken and rice but with equivalent nutrition). Three and a half hours later I eat another. Three hours later, another, and repeat and repeat. Five meals down, and I was NEVER starving during the day.

I'll walk for 25 minutes when I get home from work. During work, I do a few exercises that require nothing but my body. Every other day I do a single set of lunges, pushups, situps, calve raises - all fairly simple. They all take less than a minute and I can feel the results very quickly.

Once a week, on Saturday or Sunday, I eat whatever the heck I want. Cheat day. Then back at it again making my meals, packing them away, and getting ready for the work week. Never have to worry about what I'm eating next as long as it's prepared ahead of time!

I'm losing a good amount of weight on this, and it's maintainable.

5 factor diet or not, just remember to watch what you put into your body during the week and you'll do just fine. If that is too hardcore for you, try weight watchers or if you love crunching numbers, take a look at John Walker's (creator of AutoCad) website. He had the same problem at work. Took it upon himself to figure out the equations behind the weight. Worth a read at the least. http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

I recommend the de-moroniser

The Global IQ goes up.