| Feel the burn |
[27 Dec 2009|06:11pm] |
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music |
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Richard Cory - Simon & Garfunkel |
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First workout in weeks, at hotel gym. They had some annoying multi-use strength machine and dumbbells, so I did dumbbell hang clean / front squat / push press, ie a hang clean into a thruster. Dumbbell thrusters are my hotel gym standby, and I figure adding a clean can't hurt. Worked from 8kg up to 18kg I think, sets of 10 early down to 7 late, maybe just 5 on the last one (I was having trouble stabilizing the dumbbells).
Owww my thighs! It doesn't seem like much weight, 18 * 2 * 2.2 = 79#. Wow, that's more than I expected, actually, that is a decent amount of weight, considering I went deep and am out of shape.
I need to get a weightlifting userpic, I should get someone to take one at Tortuga sometime.
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| Book |
[27 Dec 2009|06:10pm] |
The good news: 243 pages, 83K words. Which sounds like a lot. And, is a lot.
The bad news: It's very rough, with many sections needing substantial editing and others not yet written. I've spent the last 10 hours of work trying to get 1 of 3 major chapters in 1 of the 3 major sections (Why Seastead) (so roughly 1/9th of the book) into shape, and it's maybe halfway to a rough draft. The 2nd major section (How To Seastead) is as rough as Why. The 3rd (Q&A) is much better though, it's not getting revised much from the existing FAQ except for the addition of two new sections that are outlines and need writing (the two major challenges: dealing with current states, and the general difficulty/expense of the ocean).
So...if we downweight the 3rd section by half, that means 10 hrs * 2 is a rough draft for (1/3) of (2/5) of the book. So that's 150 hours, or roughly a month of full-time work at 40hrs/week. In reality, it will be more like 1/3 time, I think. 3 months is way longer than I wanted to have a full rough draft ready. Hmph. Hopefully I can squeeze more than 40 hrs/week out of myself in Jan! Speaking of which, back to work...
(written while offline)
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| Get my ranting in |
[27 Dec 2009|06:10pm] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) evwhore says I should get my genetics & global warming ranting in before Jan 1, 2010, and steuard made a post that pushed my trigger button hard, so it's ranting time! He wrote:I find the premise of the study to be pretty cheesy. They apparently believe that my ability to take standardized tests way back in 7th grade is supposed to correlate significantly with intelligence. That was probably a factor, but especially at that early age I'd think that my parents' habit of reading to me (and encouraging me to read grown-up books) contributed at least as much, to say nothing of the Lincoln public school system's fantastic gifted program To paraphrase the brilliant mhartl: "So then you believe the difference between humans and chimpanzees is that our parents read to us, and we have good public school systems?" Oh, you don't? So then, intelligence is genetic, right? Oh, but it just doesn't vary within the species? Wait a sec, pardon me for bringing in the details of science, but I thought the way that evolution proceeded was by selecting for differences among individuals of a certain species? Doesn't that mean that the way you get from chimpanzees to human is through heritable differences in the relevant traits? And I keep hearing that we split from the other primates relatively recently, by evolutionary standards, and that the selective pressure for intelligence was really strong, so doesn't that mean we aren't at steady state yet, and the variation is still there?
( Really long rant about Mendelian genetics )
The people who are finding this don't want this to be true. I don't want this to be true. I'm a parent! But that is what the evidence says, and that is good science - to believe it. There are plenty of reasons to read to our kids, and to bless our parents, without the delusion that reading to our kids early makes them do better on IQ tests.
(I have a picture now of Dot at the end of the "I'm Cute" song, after she said "I AM ANGRY, I AM FURIOUS, I HAVE HAD IT!", huffing, and puffing....that's what my brain is like right now :) )
YAY JANUARY FIRST 2010! Soon you will free me from this ranting...I hope. I need more people to make bets with me.
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| Is the Tipping Point Toast? |
[26 Dec 2009|09:30pm] |
Madonna became a breakout star in 1983. But if you rewound the world back to 1982, would Madonna break out again? To find out, Watts built a world populated with real live music fans picking real music, then hit rewind, over and over again. Working with two colleagues, Watts designed an online music-downloading service. They filled it with 48 songs by new, unknown, and unsigned bands. Then they recruited roughly 14,000 people to log in. Some were asked to rank the songs based on their own personal preference, without regard to what other people thought. They were picking songs purely on each song's merit. But the other participants were put into eight groups that had "social influence": Each could see how other members of the group were ranking the songs. http://www.fastcompany.com/node/641124/print. Via Desiree Dudley Posted via web from crasch's posterous
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| Crash Pads |
[26 Dec 2009|07:50pm] |
At 44" x 70" this pad is the biggest on the market. Just like our regular Crash Pad, five inches of open and closed foam cushions your drop, but your aim can be slightly off 'cause there's plenty of landing space. You and your friends can lean back and enjoy a civilized lunch break on the full sized lounge bench. When the performance is done it's the perfect full mattress to throw in the back of your ride for a night of stargazing or catching z's before your next show. Posted via web from crasch's posterous
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| Changes |
[26 Dec 2009|02:12pm] |
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Original: craschworks - comments So, I’ve been using a plugin to automatically post to LJ every time I posted to my blog. I’ve also started posting more to Facebook than to LJ (since so many sites make it so easy). However, I don’t like building up my history in the closed ecosystem that is Facebook. So I’m going to be posting to my blog first, and syndicate via RSS to Facebook and Livejournal. Here is my blog’s direct feed:
http://www.craschworks.com/feed/
and here is the LJ feed:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/craschworks/
I will continue to use LJ for "private" posts. Should I continue to crosspost public posts to LJ? If I do, those of you subscribed to both LJ and FB will see dupes. If I turn off crossposting, you could still subscribe to the syndicated feed for the public posts, and see the private posts here. On the other hand, that would mean you'd have to subscribe to the syndicated feed.
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| Hyderabadi women are dumpy |
[26 Dec 2009|09:29pm] |
Now, I don't really mind this, because I'm easily distractible by hotties and when I see cute girls lights flash in my head and bells ring and I lose my train of thought. It's kinda relaxing - the only distracting women are those in burqas, which leaves room for the imagination (sometimes).
But still, it's surprising - what is it with all women in Hyderabad, of all ages, being dumpy and out of shape? I haven't seen a single good set of abs on a woman outside a billboard since we got here. And that includes the high school/colllege age upper class girls in fancy clothes and makeup who came into the fancy restaurant we were eating in. Even they were dumpy!
I don't think it's the poverty, b/c there were hot women in Panama & Costa Rica, plus the aforementioned upper class girls here were the same. I don't think it's an Indian racial thing (or at least not primarily), b/c avani and martian687 both have hot bods - way hotter than anyone I've seen here. I'm going to go with my prejudices and blame it on the high-carb diet. I hear rumors of unusually high rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease here, which fits with the theory of widespread insulin resistance due to the naan + rice + little bits of other things diet.
p.s. partway through writing this, we went to dinner, and I saw the first vaguely cute girl in 2 weeks. Somewhere in the 15-22 age range. She'd be about a 5 on the 1-10 scale at home, so the fact that she jumped out at me as "holy crap the cutest girl I've seen here" shows you just what it's like.
p.p.s. if anyone finds this post offensive, I'd be curious to hear you articulate why.
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| More Glee Squee |
[26 Dec 2009|06:57pm] |
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music |
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Something from Glee |
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(We're halfway through Season 1.)
One of the big things I love about the show is how good the choreography is. They could have let it take second stage to the singing and slacked off on it, and I bet a lot of people focus on the singing more because it's more noticeable and easier to get. But as someone into dance, I watch the moves a lot, and I think the dance choreography is consistently phenomenal. It's a real pleasure to watch.
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| Author = hermit |
[26 Dec 2009|02:42pm] |
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music |
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Deep Dance 89 |
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Today's obvious lesson: Writing requires solitude.
It's distracting to my writing just to have Shannon in the room with me reading and not talking to me at all.
WTF was I doing trying to write a book in an office?
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| Laser-cut Christmas presents - Wood with spiral grain |
[26 Dec 2009|12:01am] |
I had the idea recently to create a wood surface with a spiral grain by using a laser cutter to cut slivers of wood that could be arranged into a circle. If each sliver has the grain pointed slightly inward toward the center of the circle, then the overall grain effect will be a spiral.
It worked out rather well on zebrawood:
Some others I made out of cherry... the spiral feel is much more subtle.
 
Construction:
 
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| New Year Prep |
[26 Dec 2009|01:20pm] |
My New Years Resolution is to lose weight, starting with working out at least 30 min/day, 5 days/week. I hadn't worked out at all with traveling, so I've started ramping up now that the trip is nearing an end. I'm doing every other day, so by the time my resolutions role around it shouldn't be quite such a shock to my system. Diet is still shit, but I figure I'll give myself slack until its time to really kick it in gear.
Something I'm doing while on vacation is cleaning out my inbox. I hadn't thought of it until just now, but I do like the notion that I'm going into the new year with a clean slate inbox ;)
In other news, my prolactin levels are finally dropping, yay!! I wonder if my starting up exercise and email cleaning out is related to feeling better because of that. Could also be just having had a lot of time to chill on vacation. It has been nice to just sit around and not have to do anything. I've been getting as much sleep as I want, and Patri and I don't go anywhere on the days that we don't have to be at the hospital. A true vacation. With lots of techno music blaring outside to give it character. ;)*
*Our resort seems to be party central, there is usually techno music blasting from at least two, sometimes three parties each evening.
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