It's hard to be objective about that - because you can 'feel tired' without having done that much work. I've recently resumed my plan to lose a few kilos of lard. Got fed up of fumbling around and failing, and went for a 'proper' medical consult about it.
Amongst other things, it turned out that I'd been exercising too hard - if you work out 'really hard' you burn off your blood sugars, and feel really like you've worked out - but you haven't shifted a gram of fat, and you've made yourself hungry. If you ignore that hunger, then it'll go away as you metabolise some fat, but it's not easy doing that.
Where having switched to 'heart rate driven' workouts - instead of 'working really hard until I was tired' I instead do about an hour at 70-80% max heart rate (for comparison, my 'working really hard' probably ran 90% for not very long).
My workouts before and after... well, I can do an hour quite comfortably on a rower - which my heart rate monitor records as about 1000 calories. And I can do that every day, where my 'previous' - "work out until tired" was much harder to do daily, and lasted if I was lucky about 20m of 'actual workout' and maybe another 20 of feeling guilty and doing 'very low intensity' hanging around the gym and pretending.
It seems to be working too. Subjectively it feels like I'm not working as hard - it takes a bit longer (but not that much considering time to get to the gym, shower etc. - 20m more I barely notice), but 'feels' quite easy. Objectively measuring it though, I'm getting a _lot_ more of a workout each day, and am doing so more days a week because it 'feels' easier.
So yes, it's very hard to estimate exercise workloads accurately, short of 'in controlled medical conditions' - I don't even trust the kcal readout on my heart rate monitor, but I do use it for comparison purposes, and I tend to assume it's right in reading the beats per minute.
Hmm, I know where you're coming from - I tried cutting back what I was eating to around 2000 kcal/day, but found I was always really hungry, and 'suffering' wearyness as a result.
Even 2500 seemed rather 'poor fare' as a rule - (that would probably have still lost me weight, given how overweight I was).
Switching to fruit and nuts as primary diet elements has served me well - I find I rather like melon, bananas and a few others, and so I take those into work. My breakfast is a muesli bar and a banana. My lunch... sometimes involves a can of tuna (and 'goop') but more often is melon, banana and nuts. My evening meal is somewhat nearer my 'normal' habits, but... as I'm not actually particularly hungry, I end up eating fairly light meaty/fatty/carbohydratey goodness.
And so I'm actaully at a point where I'm in danger of _under_ eating (did actually start suffering mouth ulcers because of this), and I'm quite comfortable on 1800-2000kcal/day. Which leaves me 'room' for _a_ beer in the evening (nights out drinking still blow my allowance, but whatever - once in a while;p)
And it's left me feeling much more 'full of life' - I'm not feeling hungy and tired all day, and exhausted when I get home. It's therefore been way easier to get to the gym on a daily basis, and that in turn has meant I'm sleeping better.
What frustrates me the most is it's actually quite easy, but the sheer amount of money involved in 'Secrets of being Slim' means a lot of rumours and fads skew the signal to noise ratio horrifically.
Too much of a workout IMO - 'getting exhausted' doesn't actually help as much as you think - it just means you're exhausted. I've found this quite recently, when I finally figured out I'd been working out too hard - essentially doing 'sprint' exercise until I was exhausted, and not actually ending up doing much exercise.
I've since switched to heart rate controlled exercise - got a heart rate monitor that lets me 'lock' an exercise zone, and starts beeping at me when I drift outside it. I then do about an hour in the 70-80% Max Heart Rate 'zone' - and it really is working very well indeed, because it's a workload that's sustainable, provides a good workout, and leaves you 'in trim' for the rest of the day.
If I try and 'work really hard' at it (and I did, for the sake of comparison) the actual amount of exercise I ended up doing was much lower - because I'd burn off 'easy to release' calories - the sugars in my bloodstream - and then I'd end up exhausted. I'd then stop working out, and recover over the next few, by presumably releasing some fat reserves.
Doing medium intensity workouts... that doesn't happen - your body conserves your blood sugar, as it has time to utilise fat reserves instead (and thus the 'OMG RUN RIGHT NOW' reserves are still there for when a lion starts chasing you) - and you remain alert and active. But you still get a good workout.
Hmm, how big a solar panel would you need to run your wi-fi router? I'd have thought they drew at least enough power to make them hard to run off solar...
But otherwise I really like that idea. Maybe you could so some kind of low power repeater type router, designed specifically for this application.
Hmm, I hadn't considered a folding bike - I'd mostly ruled out cycling due to lack of storage space for my bike. And because I don't like arriving in work 'hot and sticky'. But given I've been doing an hour in the gym before work for the last few weeks, cycling might well work out better.
Maybe I'm too late to the party, but as someone who has... pretty much this situation, I'm currently doing something about it.
The think that I've found particularly useful is fitbug - http://www.fitbug.com/ - they send you a pedometer, USB cable and set a daily aerobic/non aerobic exercise target. And they also let you record what you're eating, and give you feedback on the nutritional balance of it - less just a number of calories, and more paying attention to fat/protein/carbohydrate, and working on a 'good' level of each. That brought me a few shocks, as some food has _way_ more than I thought - the pizzas I ate being a prime example.
It's really quite easy, and also appeals to my inner geek - so much so that I've altered my routine to get my 'daily steps' in (actually, I 'cheat' and go to the gym, because it's more time efficient - and that's a good motivator for me) and am eating... I think it's mostly fruit/nuts and a generally lower food intake.
Seems to be working too, although I've started from 'extremely lardy' and am aiming for 'a bit lardy' as my long term goal.
And it's not 'starving myself' either - my calorie target is something like 2800/day, to do with the 12,400 steps (I do about 6000 steps/hour, and cover 3 miles, so that's about 2 hours of walking during the day).
Feeling fit and well has been a godsend - as has being able to 'fit in' 10 minutes here and there through the day.
I was so disappointed the first day I figured out that one:
http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-ice-creams-vanilla-i19095 - vanilla icecream is 145 "calories" per 72g.
If we assume it's mostly water, and it's at zero degrees - then the definition of a 'calorie' is the amount of energy needed to raise one gram of water by 1 degree. So... zero degrees to 37, 72 grams of 'water' - 2664 calories needed! Ice cream is NEGATIVE energy food.
This of course, ends up way less attractive when you add in the 'k':)
Literally speaking, you are correct - energy in vs. energy out are what determines whether you gain weight. But unfortunately that's not the whole story - your body is really good at keeping you alive, so if you eat too little, it will start to conserve energy - you'll be tired, lethargic and unable to concentrate... and will end up not using very much energy when you do work out, because you are tired.
Sames true of gaining weight - you'll lay down energy surplus as fat, but you can also gain weight in the form of muscle - one's bad, the other's... less so.
Exercise patterns are similar - I've found just recently that I was exercising too hard - I was basically running myself to 'exhausted' really quickly, but not actually using up that much energy in the process - despite feeling like I had had a good workout.
You also get that 'energy conservation' mechanism occuring when your nutrion is poor - 2500 kcal/day of butter is about the right amount, but... well, you'll end up with a nicely screwed metabolism, and may well end up no better off.
*shrug*. I've been trying for ages trying a 'calories counting in + exercising' routine (honest) but it didn't work very well. What has worked dramatically shifting _what_ I eat, maintaining 'about' maintenance levels for my age/build, and then working out aerobically at _medium_ intensity. (using a heart rate monitor)
Actual numbers look pretty similar - they really do. But I'm bouncing around during the day, because I'm not totally shattered, and I'm sleeping much better - and the weight is dropping steadily.
Well, they do and they don't. Bikes themselves accelerate quite quick, but there's a very large temptation on the part of the rider to conserve energy - allow yourself to accumulate kinetic energy on the way down a hill, to 'spend' it on the way back up again, and hope you didn't need to stop at the bottom.
But either way, I'd love to see some kind of regenerative braking on a bike, simpy for those moments when I know slowing down would be a good idea, but I don't want to waste that energy I'd built up through the sweat of my brow.
I really hate loathe and despise those flashing LED lights that seem to becoming fashionable.
The reason's quite simple - in the dark, you cannot easily fix the position of a flashing light source. They also serve as a distraction, and as I'm sure we're all quite well aware distractions are bad when in control of a ton of metal.
There's _NOTHING_ wrong with a static light source - it's much easier to tell where it is, and it serves the purpose of illuminating the bike.
Of course, that does also include the cyclists actually wearing something other than black at night too I guess - high vis vests just don't seem to be very 'cool' though.
Like it or not, the rise of the BNP is democracy at work. For all you or I disagree with their party line, none the less they have voter support.
I too hope they sink without a trace, but if they do not... well, that'll be us getting exactly what we deserve.
Both fast food and street traders are increasingly getting hand held card readers. At least for the mainstream ones. Can't think when the last time was I couldn't use a card, that wasn't 'buying something from a friend' level of transaction.
Would you say that oppression makes terrorism more, or less likely to occur?
Whilst your example has Osama Bin Laden caught and locked up, it ignores the other question - why does he do it in the first place. The answer is simply one of intolerance and hate - and that's something that just gets _worse_ when you do things like that, not better.
Only tomorrow's terrorists might just be home grown...
We in the UK have already won that race. We already have more than enough surveillance cameras to know what's going on without needing this flimflam GPS tracking thing.
The US is just racing for second place. Just watch, it'll be congestion charging next...
Depends what you mean by innovative - it's obstructive certainly, but there's some areas where there aren't room for bugs or logic errors - there, innovative comes second to safety guarantees, and that's where you need process control.
The danger is though, as you make things easier, you end up trivialising the gameplay. Playing through doom with cheats makes it easier, sure. Does it make it as compelling and interesting a game? I don't think so.
*shrug*. Not that my opinion will influence Blizzard or anything, but this is another step from them just selling level whatever characters outright.
Because the game is based around a level system. If the level system is dull or a chore, then the game is fundamentally broken. Putting in grind just for the sake of being a grind is just sloppy game design.
VMWare's still doing a lot of stuff in software, that a mainframe does in hardware though. But yes, it's a step in the right direction, expecially with EMC stuffing a VMAX as an option for more scalability.
Concept's similar though.
Severity is irrelevant - human rights are something that get eroded gradually as a rule - you need surveillance because of the terrorists. You need trial without jury because there are some evil people. You need detention without trial because you can't reveal your sources.
And then one day you wake up, to find that you're being watched all the time, and the person watching you has _sole discretion_ to arrest, try and convict you of... whatever crime he thought you were commiting.
Human rights... aren't automatically granted - they're badly named, because they are not 'rights' that are automatically granted. They're... more like obligations. Duties. Things that we say we believe in, and if we do, we MUST stand up for them - because if we don't, who else will? It's very convenient to shuffle 'civil liberties' to one side, because 'there is a danger in the world' but that road... well, people have been down that road many times in human history, and it rarely ends well.
No one likes having a vulture looking over their shoulder, when they try to justify their existance.
From 'making mistakes' to 'monitoring productivity' only the most stupid user _doesn't_ try to game the system. Perhaps in a world where 'honest mistakes' which _everyone_ makes, weren't treated as reasons to sack them but instead something to investigate, develop and prevent from re-occuring - that's more an engineering mindset though I guess.
Regardless, it'll always be cheaper to sack people for 'incompetence' (read 'making an error') than it is to fix the problem in the first place, or actually be honest when you have to reduce staffing levels.
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The support vehicle carrying your spares on the other hand, is a bit more of an issue...
It's hard to be objective about that - because you can 'feel tired' without having done that much work. I've recently resumed my plan to lose a few kilos of lard. Got fed up of fumbling around and failing, and went for a 'proper' medical consult about it. ... well, I can do an hour quite comfortably on a rower - which my heart rate monitor records as about 1000 calories. And I can do that every day, where my 'previous' - "work out until tired" was much harder to do daily, and lasted if I was lucky about 20m of 'actual workout' and maybe another 20 of feeling guilty and doing 'very low intensity' hanging around the gym and pretending.
Amongst other things, it turned out that I'd been exercising too hard - if you work out 'really hard' you burn off your blood sugars, and feel really like you've worked out - but you haven't shifted a gram of fat, and you've made yourself hungry. If you ignore that hunger, then it'll go away as you metabolise some fat, but it's not easy doing that.
Where having switched to 'heart rate driven' workouts - instead of 'working really hard until I was tired' I instead do about an hour at 70-80% max heart rate (for comparison, my 'working really hard' probably ran 90% for not very long).
My workouts before and after
It seems to be working too. Subjectively it feels like I'm not working as hard - it takes a bit longer (but not that much considering time to get to the gym, shower etc. - 20m more I barely notice), but 'feels' quite easy. Objectively measuring it though, I'm getting a _lot_ more of a workout each day, and am doing so more days a week because it 'feels' easier.
So yes, it's very hard to estimate exercise workloads accurately, short of 'in controlled medical conditions' - I don't even trust the kcal readout on my heart rate monitor, but I do use it for comparison purposes, and I tend to assume it's right in reading the beats per minute.
Hmm, I know where you're coming from - I tried cutting back what I was eating to around 2000 kcal/day, but found I was always really hungry, and 'suffering' wearyness as a result. ... as I'm not actually particularly hungry, I end up eating fairly light meaty/fatty/carbohydratey goodness. ;p)
Even 2500 seemed rather 'poor fare' as a rule - (that would probably have still lost me weight, given how overweight I was).
Switching to fruit and nuts as primary diet elements has served me well - I find I rather like melon, bananas and a few others, and so I take those into work. My breakfast is a muesli bar and a banana. My lunch... sometimes involves a can of tuna (and 'goop') but more often is melon, banana and nuts. My evening meal is somewhat nearer my 'normal' habits, but
And so I'm actaully at a point where I'm in danger of _under_ eating (did actually start suffering mouth ulcers because of this), and I'm quite comfortable on 1800-2000kcal/day. Which leaves me 'room' for _a_ beer in the evening (nights out drinking still blow my allowance, but whatever - once in a while
And it's left me feeling much more 'full of life' - I'm not feeling hungy and tired all day, and exhausted when I get home. It's therefore been way easier to get to the gym on a daily basis, and that in turn has meant I'm sleeping better.
What frustrates me the most is it's actually quite easy, but the sheer amount of money involved in 'Secrets of being Slim' means a lot of rumours and fads skew the signal to noise ratio horrifically.
Too much of a workout IMO - 'getting exhausted' doesn't actually help as much as you think - it just means you're exhausted. I've found this quite recently, when I finally figured out I'd been working out too hard - essentially doing 'sprint' exercise until I was exhausted, and not actually ending up doing much exercise. ... that doesn't happen - your body conserves your blood sugar, as it has time to utilise fat reserves instead (and thus the 'OMG RUN RIGHT NOW' reserves are still there for when a lion starts chasing you) - and you remain alert and active. But you still get a good workout.
I've since switched to heart rate controlled exercise - got a heart rate monitor that lets me 'lock' an exercise zone, and starts beeping at me when I drift outside it. I then do about an hour in the 70-80% Max Heart Rate 'zone' - and it really is working very well indeed, because it's a workload that's sustainable, provides a good workout, and leaves you 'in trim' for the rest of the day.
If I try and 'work really hard' at it (and I did, for the sake of comparison) the actual amount of exercise I ended up doing was much lower - because I'd burn off 'easy to release' calories - the sugars in my bloodstream - and then I'd end up exhausted. I'd then stop working out, and recover over the next few, by presumably releasing some fat reserves.
Doing medium intensity workouts
That job may not be - but when the choice is between job and no job it gets a bit harder to decide.
Hmm, how big a solar panel would you need to run your wi-fi router? I'd have thought they drew at least enough power to make them hard to run off solar...
But otherwise I really like that idea. Maybe you could so some kind of low power repeater type router, designed specifically for this application.
Hmm, I hadn't considered a folding bike - I'd mostly ruled out cycling due to lack of storage space for my bike. And because I don't like arriving in work 'hot and sticky'. But given I've been doing an hour in the gym before work for the last few weeks, cycling might well work out better.
Maybe I'm too late to the party, but as someone who has ... pretty much this situation, I'm currently doing something about it.
... I think it's mostly fruit/nuts and a generally lower food intake.
The think that I've found particularly useful is fitbug - http://www.fitbug.com/ - they send you a pedometer, USB cable and set a daily aerobic/non aerobic exercise target. And they also let you record what you're eating, and give you feedback on the nutritional balance of it - less just a number of calories, and more paying attention to fat/protein/carbohydrate, and working on a 'good' level of each. That brought me a few shocks, as some food has _way_ more than I thought - the pizzas I ate being a prime example.
It's really quite easy, and also appeals to my inner geek - so much so that I've altered my routine to get my 'daily steps' in (actually, I 'cheat' and go to the gym, because it's more time efficient - and that's a good motivator for me) and am eating
Seems to be working too, although I've started from 'extremely lardy' and am aiming for 'a bit lardy' as my long term goal.
And it's not 'starving myself' either - my calorie target is something like 2800/day, to do with the 12,400 steps (I do about 6000 steps/hour, and cover 3 miles, so that's about 2 hours of walking during the day).
Feeling fit and well has been a godsend - as has being able to 'fit in' 10 minutes here and there through the day.
I was so disappointed the first day I figured out that one: :)
http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-ice-creams-vanilla-i19095 - vanilla icecream is 145 "calories" per 72g.
If we assume it's mostly water, and it's at zero degrees - then the definition of a 'calorie' is the amount of energy needed to raise one gram of water by 1 degree. So... zero degrees to 37, 72 grams of 'water' - 2664 calories needed! Ice cream is NEGATIVE energy food.
This of course, ends up way less attractive when you add in the 'k'
Literally speaking, you are correct - energy in vs. energy out are what determines whether you gain weight. But unfortunately that's not the whole story - your body is really good at keeping you alive, so if you eat too little, it will start to conserve energy - you'll be tired, lethargic and unable to concentrate ... and will end up not using very much energy when you do work out, because you are tired. ... less so. ... well, you'll end up with a nicely screwed metabolism, and may well end up no better off.
Sames true of gaining weight - you'll lay down energy surplus as fat, but you can also gain weight in the form of muscle - one's bad, the other's
Exercise patterns are similar - I've found just recently that I was exercising too hard - I was basically running myself to 'exhausted' really quickly, but not actually using up that much energy in the process - despite feeling like I had had a good workout.
You also get that 'energy conservation' mechanism occuring when your nutrion is poor - 2500 kcal/day of butter is about the right amount, but
*shrug*. I've been trying for ages trying a 'calories counting in + exercising' routine (honest) but it didn't work very well. What has worked dramatically shifting _what_ I eat, maintaining 'about' maintenance levels for my age/build, and then working out aerobically at _medium_ intensity. (using a heart rate monitor)
Actual numbers look pretty similar - they really do. But I'm bouncing around during the day, because I'm not totally shattered, and I'm sleeping much better - and the weight is dropping steadily.
Comparison isn't causation either....
Well, they do and they don't. Bikes themselves accelerate quite quick, but there's a very large temptation on the part of the rider to conserve energy - allow yourself to accumulate kinetic energy on the way down a hill, to 'spend' it on the way back up again, and hope you didn't need to stop at the bottom.
But either way, I'd love to see some kind of regenerative braking on a bike, simpy for those moments when I know slowing down would be a good idea, but I don't want to waste that energy I'd built up through the sweat of my brow.
I really hate loathe and despise those flashing LED lights that seem to becoming fashionable.
The reason's quite simple - in the dark, you cannot easily fix the position of a flashing light source. They also serve as a distraction, and as I'm sure we're all quite well aware distractions are bad when in control of a ton of metal.
There's _NOTHING_ wrong with a static light source - it's much easier to tell where it is, and it serves the purpose of illuminating the bike.
Of course, that does also include the cyclists actually wearing something other than black at night too I guess - high vis vests just don't seem to be very 'cool' though.
Like it or not, the rise of the BNP is democracy at work. For all you or I disagree with their party line, none the less they have voter support.
I too hope they sink without a trace, but if they do not... well, that'll be us getting exactly what we deserve.
Both fast food and street traders are increasingly getting hand held card readers. At least for the mainstream ones. Can't think when the last time was I couldn't use a card, that wasn't 'buying something from a friend' level of transaction.
But that's ok. Surely they'd never lose records out of a database like that.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/uk_politics/7104945.stm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/12/government_loses_more/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/16/more_papers_go_missing/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/02/ny_bank_lost_data_flap/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/15/more_nhs_data_losses/
The list goes on. Personally, I feel that all a self respecting geek can do is get a job working with the database. I mean, if someone's going to HAVE that power, and be evil, it's better to be at the top of the pile...
Would you say that oppression makes terrorism more, or less likely to occur?
Whilst your example has Osama Bin Laden caught and locked up, it ignores the other question - why does he do it in the first place. The answer is simply one of intolerance and hate - and that's something that just gets _worse_ when you do things like that, not better.
Only tomorrow's terrorists might just be home grown...
We in the UK have already won that race. We already have more than enough surveillance cameras to know what's going on without needing this flimflam GPS tracking thing.
The US is just racing for second place. Just watch, it'll be congestion charging next...
What nonsense. You have no freedom, and you never did. Now get back to the fields, peasant, before your pay gets cut for malingering.
Depends what you mean by innovative - it's obstructive certainly, but there's some areas where there aren't room for bugs or logic errors - there, innovative comes second to safety guarantees, and that's where you need process control.
The danger is though, as you make things easier, you end up trivialising the gameplay. Playing through doom with cheats makes it easier, sure. Does it make it as compelling and interesting a game? I don't think so.
*shrug*. Not that my opinion will influence Blizzard or anything, but this is another step from them just selling level whatever characters outright.
Because the game is based around a level system. If the level system is dull or a chore, then the game is fundamentally broken. Putting in grind just for the sake of being a grind is just sloppy game design.
VMWare's still doing a lot of stuff in software, that a mainframe does in hardware though. But yes, it's a step in the right direction, expecially with EMC stuffing a VMAX as an option for more scalability.
Concept's similar though.
Severity is irrelevant - human rights are something that get eroded gradually as a rule - you need surveillance because of the terrorists. You need trial without jury because there are some evil people. You need detention without trial because you can't reveal your sources. ... whatever crime he thought you were commiting.
... aren't automatically granted - they're badly named, because they are not 'rights' that are automatically granted. They're ... more like obligations. Duties. Things that we say we believe in, and if we do, we MUST stand up for them - because if we don't, who else will? It's very convenient to shuffle 'civil liberties' to one side, because 'there is a danger in the world' but that road... well, people have been down that road many times in human history, and it rarely ends well.
And then one day you wake up, to find that you're being watched all the time, and the person watching you has _sole discretion_ to arrest, try and convict you of
Human rights
No one likes having a vulture looking over their shoulder, when they try to justify their existance.
From 'making mistakes' to 'monitoring productivity' only the most stupid user _doesn't_ try to game the system. Perhaps in a world where 'honest mistakes' which _everyone_ makes, weren't treated as reasons to sack them but instead something to investigate, develop and prevent from re-occuring - that's more an engineering mindset though I guess.
Regardless, it'll always be cheaper to sack people for 'incompetence' (read 'making an error') than it is to fix the problem in the first place, or actually be honest when you have to reduce staffing levels.