I'm all for "math is cool," and "let's explore," but this guy seriously torques me off. My kids are currently suffering from the influence of people like him. They have taken the basics out of math and substituted this useless "math explorations" curriculum. Other folks have written better criticisms, but suffice it to say that the vast majority of kids don't benefit from all this "exploration" and "visualization" and the ones who do would have had those epiphanies anyway without any help whatsoever.
The BETTER way is to stick to the basics and train teachers to recognize kids who have a mathematically artistic talent and then remove them to an environment where it can flourish. That's tough for a couple of reasons. First, those kids might not actually get good grades. The author of TFA is entirely correct that the basics bore them which results in inattention and lack of motivation. Second, when they ARE good, removing them will lower the overall test scores of the class. Since teachers' pay and bonus structures are based on their students' test scores, there would be a strong monetary motivation to intentionally fail to recognize them.
Assuming that those two problems can be overcome (big assumption there), you continue to train the "artistic" kids in the basics, but only just enough to get by. The rest of the time, you motivate them in a way that would make the author of TFA happy.
The problem is, people have this wonderful but sadly mistaken belief that ALL kids can benefit from artistic mathematics when in fact most can't. Compounding the problem is the bizarre theory that teaching the artistic mathematics will somehow magically result in the basics becoming trivially easy. It doesn't. And unfortunately, our kids have to fail spectacularly in order to teach the education system this simple fact. "Luckily," that's what they're doing in droves.
There is no difference (other than media) between an ABP filterset and a set of pages custom-cut to fit over a particular edition of a newspaper or magazine and block the print of all advertisements therein, leaving non-advertisement text and pictures visible via cut-outs.
Let's say you obtain said magazine and page-by-age place the "PABP" (paper ad-block plus) "filters" such that you can read the entire magazine without ever setting eyes on a single advertisement. Is this illegal? Immoral? Unethical? I can't see how it is. Doesn't matter if the magazine is sold or given away for free. Once you get it, it's yours and you can look at any part of it you like.
In the paper publishing world, delivery of the "substrate" media (the magazine, newspaper, etc) is exactly equivalent to delivery of the advertising media. They cannot be separated. The advertiser, therefore, knows that his message has been delivered and counts on its positioning and his own unique presentation to make it eye-catching enough that the reader notices.
In the electronic publishing world, some genius decided to separate the advertisements from the content. Where previously it would have impossibly difficult to block the ads (who is patient enough to make a paper cut-out for every page of a magazine and carefully place it so that only the articles' text shows through?), now blocking is only a matter of applying a series of regular expressions. But the same principle applies. Once you've downloaded the "substrate" content (i.e. the pages hosting the advertisements), you are under no obligation follow any of the links. It's YOUR bandwidth, not the advertisers. If anything, the advertisers are stealing from YOU when they download commercial media without your consent.
The real problem is this: Advertisers are lazy. They are faced with a new type of media and are unwilling to invest the time and money to fully integrate the advertising with the "substrate." It's not impossible, and it doesn't have to be expensive. Look at the Hemmingway mock-prose competition that gets held every year. The contestants are required to incorporate the name of the sponsor in every submission, or the submission is disqualified. And for the price of a few trophies and a little PR, the sponsor of that contest gets amazing amounts of advertising.
Unfortunately, really integrating advertising with its "substrate" media takes a lot of thought and effort. So basically it boils down to a bunch of stupid lazy individuals who would rather point fingers at "evil users" than do their jobs. Sorry, fellas. The Whinery Tour starts every hour on the hour. Queue up under the sign with the picture of Sour Grapes.
Rueters, Batavia IL: Citing a weak nuclear force and inability to provide satisfying quantum entanglement, a local Top Quark has cancelled his EHarmony.com account and given up on finding a paired partner. "I feel like I'm decaying into something strange. I'm down all the time. At the bottom of my barrel. It's sort of like I'm never quite sure of where I am, or where I'm going, or at least not both at the same time," said the disappointed fundamental particle of creation.
EHarmony.com representatives say they tried to talk the depressed 31x10^-33year-old, but were unable to convince him to keep his account active. "We don't offer refunds, but we did him an additional 6 femtoseconds to find that scintillating someone."
When interviewed, the parents of the particle, also expressed disappointment. "We were hoping he'd find a Jewish girl, get married, maybe give us a little boson someday. Where did I go wrong?" sobbed his mother. "He'll be fine, honey" said the quark's father, comforting his wife. "After all, we had to go through 20 billion collisions to find each other, didn't we?" The father, a well-respected lawyer and his wife, a homemaker, live in Hackensack but speak to their son regularly.
Looking at his latest matches, the Top Quark sighed. "Mom and Dad are so different. He's a proton, she's so totally anti-proton. I don't know. If they could find each other, why can't I find anybody?"
I'd like to see something cheap and simple like this that I can plug one side of into the internet and the otherside into the "outbound" port of my home network. The goal would be to provide easy "net nanny" functionality that couldn't be defeated by a savy 14-year old. Since I would have physical control of the network (it's in the locked utility closet), I could have reasonable assurance that he's not visiting questionable sites (like that wretched hive of scum and villainy that is Slashdot).
This is nothing new. I've been making boats like this since I was a kid. All it takes is a calm pond with pine trees growing nearby.
Take a matchstick sized dry twig. Find a pine tree that's oozing sap from a scratch in the bark or a broken branch/twig. The sap should have the viscosity of syrup. Dip one end of the dry twig in the pine sap, bringing up a tear drop-sized dollop of sap. Drop your highly-advanced research vessel in a nearby pond and watch it put-put around for a good minute or so before all the sap is gone or it gets stuck in its own sap trail.
Thinking about it, you could probably do this at home with an actual match stick and some pancake syrup. It's just always been an outdoor sort of thing for me.
Investigator: And in this picture, you see a woman holding a limp puppy in her lap next to an autocopter with a red smudge on the hood. Isn't that cool? Someone totally wiped out that puppy!
Potential Replicant: No! It's awful. That poor woman and her poor little puppy!
Investigator: Replicant! You're a replicant because you didn't understand that I was using sarcasm about it being cool that the puppy was hurt. And furthermore, you didn't show empathy with the woman. Oh wait...
- Dodged the RPG that's COMING RIGHT AT ME!!!
- Rotated the camera angle for fifteen minutes trying to look up a hot high-elf babe's robes
- Leaned left, right, and back while in a dog fight with a MIG
- Had their tummy do flip-flops when the character on screen jumps of an impossibly high cliff/building/etc
- Jumped waaaaay back out of the way when the spooky creepy wet-haired Japanese girl comes crawling out of the monitor
OK, I made that last one up- but if she ever does come crawling out of the monitor I'm gonna run like heck and not care who hears me scream like a girl.
The grieved-for party doesn't even have to be dead for this to occur. I distinctly remember waking up one morning after breaking up with a long-term (4yrs) girlfriend and hearing her cooking breakfast, feeling the warm depression in the bed where she had slept, and "remembering" her climbing over me to go to the kitchen. The illusion was so vivid that I actually smelled bacon cooking and called out to ask her when her flight had got in (she had been living in another country at the time of the break up). When I went into the kitchen and saw nobody there, the sounds and smells of cooking immediately stopped, and I was hit with the most profound sense of grief I had ever experienced. I actually became suddenly convinced that she had passed away and somehow come to say "goodbye."
And get this- when I called her up and explained that I didn't want to bother her but I had had a very weird experience and just wanted to make sure she was OK, she told me that she had had a very similar experience. She was at a video store about to pick up a video, and without thinking she held it up for approval to someone across the room. She had somehow convinced herself it was me (in fact, it turned out to be someone who looked very similar). Not quite as profound, but still we both experienced the effect described in the article.
Unfortunately due to presence of an ocean and most of two continents between us, this did not lead to awesome reunited-and-it-feels-so-good nookie. It did, however, take much of the sting of a very bitter break-up away.
Where is that BBQ place? I would patronize them solely for the pleasure of gawping at their overwhelming bizzarity. Hell, I'd schedule a vacation around it. Please provide me with a list of key phrases that will push their freakish conservatard buttons. I was thinking maybe "do you accept food stamps?" and "thank goodness they upped the sales tax- my wife's state-run pension fund was facing a $2M shortfall this year, and there was a chance we wouldn't get the mandated raise in benefits" and "Is it true that they're going to seize this property under emminent domain to build the new library?"
They need to make a Roomba that can vacuum the dust off the solar panels. Or put a whisk on a articulated arm or something. Amazing lifespan these things, but imagine if they had just been able to clear their own dust off instead of hoping for a windstorm to blow them clean.
I rarely see anyone wearing a watch these days either. The clock on the cell phone is more accurate and doesn't require setting. Of course, when you are outside the range of cell service it can be a problem.
I call BS on this. Gambling is not "Entertainment." That's a sucker's myth perpetrated by the gambling industry. People buy into this myth because there are a LOT of very intelligent and creative people getting paid a LOT of money to hype it in every media available to them.
If someone believes for even a second that you are being "entertained" by throwing their money away, I invite him to come to my house where I have carved a slot into the box my new refrigerator came in. Your money goes in the slot. My two-year-old will be inside and will shake his chiming apple thingy, and wave his Dora the Explorer flashlight back and forth every time he decides to give some of it back. Please, let me entertain you, suckers.
What about 'em? Well they're crap, that's what. The same way that cheap plastic table lamps that look like Tiffany lamps are crap. When I want to read a Douglas Adams book, I want to read a Douglas Adams book, not a book that will have DOUGLAS ADAMS in bold print and the actual writer (note that I do not grace the cad with the name "author") in teeny tiny print. Don't think they'll do that? Bet me $1000 bux then. When the book comes out, whose name is going to be in bigger print? You know it'll be DA's name.
I'm tired of these "postquels" (posthumous sequels) being sold as if they are the work of the original author. Not everyone is smart enough to know the difference, and it can turn off a reader who would otherwise have become a fan (alas too late to eagerly wait for REAL sequels).
...of people who have absolutely no interest in buying the game, but who will claim they didn't because it was infected with DRM.
I'm surprised there's not a hardcore fundie backlash against the game due to the fact that its creatures evolved- or do they secretly love it because you get to play "intelligent designer?"
Your Honor:
One of two possibilities exist, and can be proven at the sub-atomic level as shown by these squiggly graphs and equations with lots of numbers and funny symbols on them:
Either all of nature is essentially random, or all of nature is entirely predestined.
In the first case, the fact that I committed that crime cannot be my fault since it resulted from something that at its root had no more "cause" than the rolling of a pair of dice. It just happened. My subatomic particles did it. It was an accident.
In the second case, the fact that I commited that crime cannot be my fault since it was going to happen no matter what. I had no control over the cause or outcome. My subatomic particles, and every subatomic particle that interacted with them, and indeed even the victim's subatomic particles had been predestined to be in that place at that time and perform those particular actions, all of which was unavoidable. It was destiny.
In neither case can I be held responsible for my actions. They were either random or predestined.
Furthermore, to imply that I had some sort of "free will" or spiritual influence on the outcome either random or predestined is a violation of my civil rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Specifically, it violates the Establishment clause. Imposing any sort of punishment on me is obviously an application of your religious beliefs in an "Animus" or "Atman" or other spiritual driving force that influences the interactions of sub-atomic particles. As an avowed atheist, I have no such beliefs and would be irreparably harmed if you attemed to impose your personal religious framework on my actions.
When design is bad, and the product is irrelevant, it's possible it will never even come out in the market.
NCR invested a crapload of money to design an internet browser that went in your fridge door. Yes, right there next to the ice dispenser. Why? NOBODY knew, not even the insane genius who took time off from scribbling quantum mechanics equations on his padded cell's walls with purple crayon to invent this thing. I think they might have actually shipped a couple, but I doubt it was enough to qualify as "coming out in the market."
I worked for a startup company that burned through $40M in six months. It's actually pretty easy to figure out when to jump ship based on the number and quality of perks. When they get rid of the bottled water and put in one of those big coolers with the 20-gallon bottle, it's time to leave. Prior to that, just enjoy the dot-com salary and catered lunches while they last and watch the slow slide into insolvency with quiet amusement.
In World of Warcraft, run between zones instead of summoning a mount or taking a hippogriff (and make sure you set the option that makes your character run instead of walk). That should burn some extra calories.
Slashdot Mirror
So, can I assign "thrust middle finger into air" to the speed dial for my ex wife?
Mommy- why is the antenna on that man's car going up and down?
And I see a whole new generation of advertisements I can't prevent from cluttering up my screen.
I'm all for "math is cool," and "let's explore," but this guy seriously torques me off. My kids are currently suffering from the influence of people like him. They have taken the basics out of math and substituted this useless "math explorations" curriculum. Other folks have written better criticisms, but suffice it to say that the vast majority of kids don't benefit from all this "exploration" and "visualization" and the ones who do would have had those epiphanies anyway without any help whatsoever.
The BETTER way is to stick to the basics and train teachers to recognize kids who have a mathematically artistic talent and then remove them to an environment where it can flourish. That's tough for a couple of reasons. First, those kids might not actually get good grades. The author of TFA is entirely correct that the basics bore them which results in inattention and lack of motivation. Second, when they ARE good, removing them will lower the overall test scores of the class. Since teachers' pay and bonus structures are based on their students' test scores, there would be a strong monetary motivation to intentionally fail to recognize them.
Assuming that those two problems can be overcome (big assumption there), you continue to train the "artistic" kids in the basics, but only just enough to get by. The rest of the time, you motivate them in a way that would make the author of TFA happy.
The problem is, people have this wonderful but sadly mistaken belief that ALL kids can benefit from artistic mathematics when in fact most can't. Compounding the problem is the bizarre theory that teaching the artistic mathematics will somehow magically result in the basics becoming trivially easy. It doesn't. And unfortunately, our kids have to fail spectacularly in order to teach the education system this simple fact. "Luckily," that's what they're doing in droves.
There is no difference (other than media) between an ABP filterset and a set of pages custom-cut to fit over a particular edition of a newspaper or magazine and block the print of all advertisements therein, leaving non-advertisement text and pictures visible via cut-outs.
Let's say you obtain said magazine and page-by-age place the "PABP" (paper ad-block plus) "filters" such that you can read the entire magazine without ever setting eyes on a single advertisement. Is this illegal? Immoral? Unethical? I can't see how it is. Doesn't matter if the magazine is sold or given away for free. Once you get it, it's yours and you can look at any part of it you like.
In the paper publishing world, delivery of the "substrate" media (the magazine, newspaper, etc) is exactly equivalent to delivery of the advertising media. They cannot be separated. The advertiser, therefore, knows that his message has been delivered and counts on its positioning and his own unique presentation to make it eye-catching enough that the reader notices.
In the electronic publishing world, some genius decided to separate the advertisements from the content. Where previously it would have impossibly difficult to block the ads (who is patient enough to make a paper cut-out for every page of a magazine and carefully place it so that only the articles' text shows through?), now blocking is only a matter of applying a series of regular expressions. But the same principle applies. Once you've downloaded the "substrate" content (i.e. the pages hosting the advertisements), you are under no obligation follow any of the links. It's YOUR bandwidth, not the advertisers. If anything, the advertisers are stealing from YOU when they download commercial media without your consent.
The real problem is this: Advertisers are lazy. They are faced with a new type of media and are unwilling to invest the time and money to fully integrate the advertising with the "substrate." It's not impossible, and it doesn't have to be expensive. Look at the Hemmingway mock-prose competition that gets held every year. The contestants are required to incorporate the name of the sponsor in every submission, or the submission is disqualified. And for the price of a few trophies and a little PR, the sponsor of that contest gets amazing amounts of advertising.
Unfortunately, really integrating advertising with its "substrate" media takes a lot of thought and effort. So basically it boils down to a bunch of stupid lazy individuals who would rather point fingers at "evil users" than do their jobs. Sorry, fellas. The Whinery Tour starts every hour on the hour. Queue up under the sign with the picture of Sour Grapes.
Rueters, Batavia IL: Citing a weak nuclear force and inability to provide satisfying quantum entanglement, a local Top Quark has cancelled his EHarmony.com account and given up on finding a paired partner. "I feel like I'm decaying into something strange. I'm down all the time. At the bottom of my barrel. It's sort of like I'm never quite sure of where I am, or where I'm going, or at least not both at the same time," said the disappointed fundamental particle of creation.
EHarmony.com representatives say they tried to talk the depressed 31x10^-33year-old, but were unable to convince him to keep his account active. "We don't offer refunds, but we did him an additional 6 femtoseconds to find that scintillating someone."
When interviewed, the parents of the particle, also expressed disappointment. "We were hoping he'd find a Jewish girl, get married, maybe give us a little boson someday. Where did I go wrong?" sobbed his mother. "He'll be fine, honey" said the quark's father, comforting his wife. "After all, we had to go through 20 billion collisions to find each other, didn't we?" The father, a well-respected lawyer and his wife, a homemaker, live in Hackensack but speak to their son regularly.
Looking at his latest matches, the Top Quark sighed. "Mom and Dad are so different. He's a proton, she's so totally anti-proton. I don't know. If they could find each other, why can't I find anybody?"
That is a very Zen question.
Look! A blurry bit on this image! Write down the coordinates and send in the bombers!
I'd like to see something cheap and simple like this that I can plug one side of into the internet and the otherside into the "outbound" port of my home network. The goal would be to provide easy "net nanny" functionality that couldn't be defeated by a savy 14-year old. Since I would have physical control of the network (it's in the locked utility closet), I could have reasonable assurance that he's not visiting questionable sites (like that wretched hive of scum and villainy that is Slashdot).
This is nothing new. I've been making boats like this since I was a kid. All it takes is a calm pond with pine trees growing nearby.
Take a matchstick sized dry twig. Find a pine tree that's oozing sap from a scratch in the bark or a broken branch/twig. The sap should have the viscosity of syrup. Dip one end of the dry twig in the pine sap, bringing up a tear drop-sized dollop of sap. Drop your highly-advanced research vessel in a nearby pond and watch it put-put around for a good minute or so before all the sap is gone or it gets stuck in its own sap trail.
Thinking about it, you could probably do this at home with an actual match stick and some pancake syrup. It's just always been an outdoor sort of thing for me.
Investigator: And in this picture, you see a woman holding a limp puppy in her lap next to an autocopter with a red smudge on the hood. Isn't that cool? Someone totally wiped out that puppy! Potential Replicant: No! It's awful. That poor woman and her poor little puppy! Investigator: Replicant! You're a replicant because you didn't understand that I was using sarcasm about it being cool that the puppy was hurt. And furthermore, you didn't show empathy with the woman. Oh wait...
- Dodged the RPG that's COMING RIGHT AT ME!!!
- Rotated the camera angle for fifteen minutes trying to look up a hot high-elf babe's robes
- Leaned left, right, and back while in a dog fight with a MIG
- Had their tummy do flip-flops when the character on screen jumps of an impossibly high cliff/building/etc
- Jumped waaaaay back out of the way when the spooky creepy wet-haired Japanese girl comes crawling out of the monitor
OK, I made that last one up- but if she ever does come crawling out of the monitor I'm gonna run like heck and not care who hears me scream like a girl.
The grieved-for party doesn't even have to be dead for this to occur. I distinctly remember waking up one morning after breaking up with a long-term (4yrs) girlfriend and hearing her cooking breakfast, feeling the warm depression in the bed where she had slept, and "remembering" her climbing over me to go to the kitchen. The illusion was so vivid that I actually smelled bacon cooking and called out to ask her when her flight had got in (she had been living in another country at the time of the break up). When I went into the kitchen and saw nobody there, the sounds and smells of cooking immediately stopped, and I was hit with the most profound sense of grief I had ever experienced. I actually became suddenly convinced that she had passed away and somehow come to say "goodbye."
And get this- when I called her up and explained that I didn't want to bother her but I had had a very weird experience and just wanted to make sure she was OK, she told me that she had had a very similar experience. She was at a video store about to pick up a video, and without thinking she held it up for approval to someone across the room. She had somehow convinced herself it was me (in fact, it turned out to be someone who looked very similar). Not quite as profound, but still we both experienced the effect described in the article.
Unfortunately due to presence of an ocean and most of two continents between us, this did not lead to awesome reunited-and-it-feels-so-good nookie. It did, however, take much of the sting of a very bitter break-up away.
I dubbed it GNU for GNU's Not Unix.
I dubb it stupid. Here is another "recursing acronym" for you: RMRAAS. Expanded it means: "RMAAR Means Recursive Acronyms are Stupid."
Sorry. His idiotic compulsion to give a complete history of how clever it was to come up with GNU just drives me nuts.
Where is that BBQ place? I would patronize them solely for the pleasure of gawping at their overwhelming bizzarity. Hell, I'd schedule a vacation around it. Please provide me with a list of key phrases that will push their freakish conservatard buttons. I was thinking maybe "do you accept food stamps?" and "thank goodness they upped the sales tax- my wife's state-run pension fund was facing a $2M shortfall this year, and there was a chance we wouldn't get the mandated raise in benefits" and "Is it true that they're going to seize this property under emminent domain to build the new library?"
They need to make a Roomba that can vacuum the dust off the solar panels. Or put a whisk on a articulated arm or something. Amazing lifespan these things, but imagine if they had just been able to clear their own dust off instead of hoping for a windstorm to blow them clean.
I rarely see anyone wearing a watch these days either. The clock on the cell phone is more accurate and doesn't require setting. Of course, when you are outside the range of cell service it can be a problem.
I call BS on this. Gambling is not "Entertainment." That's a sucker's myth perpetrated by the gambling industry. People buy into this myth because there are a LOT of very intelligent and creative people getting paid a LOT of money to hype it in every media available to them.
If someone believes for even a second that you are being "entertained" by throwing their money away, I invite him to come to my house where I have carved a slot into the box my new refrigerator came in. Your money goes in the slot. My two-year-old will be inside and will shake his chiming apple thingy, and wave his Dora the Explorer flashlight back and forth every time he decides to give some of it back. Please, let me entertain you, suckers.
What about 'em? Well they're crap, that's what. The same way that cheap plastic table lamps that look like Tiffany lamps are crap. When I want to read a Douglas Adams book, I want to read a Douglas Adams book, not a book that will have DOUGLAS ADAMS in bold print and the actual writer (note that I do not grace the cad with the name "author") in teeny tiny print. Don't think they'll do that? Bet me $1000 bux then. When the book comes out, whose name is going to be in bigger print? You know it'll be DA's name.
I'm tired of these "postquels" (posthumous sequels) being sold as if they are the work of the original author. Not everyone is smart enough to know the difference, and it can turn off a reader who would otherwise have become a fan (alas too late to eagerly wait for REAL sequels).
...of people who have absolutely no interest in buying the game, but who will claim they didn't because it was infected with DRM.
I'm surprised there's not a hardcore fundie backlash against the game due to the fact that its creatures evolved- or do they secretly love it because you get to play "intelligent designer?"
When you take a breath?
Your Honor: One of two possibilities exist, and can be proven at the sub-atomic level as shown by these squiggly graphs and equations with lots of numbers and funny symbols on them:
Either all of nature is essentially random, or all of nature is entirely predestined.
In the first case, the fact that I committed that crime cannot be my fault since it resulted from something that at its root had no more "cause" than the rolling of a pair of dice. It just happened. My subatomic particles did it. It was an accident.
In the second case, the fact that I commited that crime cannot be my fault since it was going to happen no matter what. I had no control over the cause or outcome. My subatomic particles, and every subatomic particle that interacted with them, and indeed even the victim's subatomic particles had been predestined to be in that place at that time and perform those particular actions, all of which was unavoidable. It was destiny.
In neither case can I be held responsible for my actions. They were either random or predestined.
Furthermore, to imply that I had some sort of "free will" or spiritual influence on the outcome either random or predestined is a violation of my civil rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Specifically, it violates the Establishment clause. Imposing any sort of punishment on me is obviously an application of your religious beliefs in an "Animus" or "Atman" or other spiritual driving force that influences the interactions of sub-atomic particles. As an avowed atheist, I have no such beliefs and would be irreparably harmed if you attemed to impose your personal religious framework on my actions.
When design is bad, and the product is irrelevant, it's possible it will never even come out in the market.
NCR invested a crapload of money to design an internet browser that went in your fridge door. Yes, right there next to the ice dispenser. Why? NOBODY knew, not even the insane genius who took time off from scribbling quantum mechanics equations on his padded cell's walls with purple crayon to invent this thing. I think they might have actually shipped a couple, but I doubt it was enough to qualify as "coming out in the market."
I worked for a startup company that burned through $40M in six months. It's actually pretty easy to figure out when to jump ship based on the number and quality of perks. When they get rid of the bottled water and put in one of those big coolers with the 20-gallon bottle, it's time to leave. Prior to that, just enjoy the dot-com salary and catered lunches while they last and watch the slow slide into insolvency with quiet amusement.
In World of Warcraft, run between zones instead of summoning a mount or taking a hippogriff (and make sure you set the option that makes your character run instead of walk). That should burn some extra calories.