The Garmin FR235 Watch Changed Me

A good title goes a long way in a blog post. How do you describe something in a sentence or less that tells the truth and yet is outlandish enough to get people to click on it? So I just said a watch changed me, and while it may not be a big change, read on to learn the details of how I have changed. 

FR235 on my wrist after breaking my hand August 20th.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, 10,000 steps a day (or whatever an appropriate goal might be for you at the current time, maybe 5000 or 15,000 steps a day) is the best total fitness program I know of in my 15 years of thinking about fitness. Here are the reasons why a step goal is so great:

You can do it anywhere. No gym membership, workout clothes, or equipment of any type required.

You can break it up into very small chunks, like 100 steps at a time. I’ll revisit this later.

That comes to around 4-5 miles of walking, which is about twice the approximately 5000 steps per day the average sedentary American walks, which would mean a significant increase in activity for sedentary people. (Disclaimer, once people start wearing a step tracker with a number they can read, they walk more, so studdies of how much people walk are often biased by people wearing step trackers that display the number of steps.) Also, it’s low impact, you’re probably not going to get an injury from walking. 

I had no idea how many steps I took before I started wearing my FR235. Turns out 4000-5000 steps, not including running was pretty standard for me. While that is perfectly acceptable when I go out and run 8000-18,000 steps in the same day, when I take a day off running, my step count plummets. 

Finally getting to the topic, the first way the watch changed me was though an inactivity bar. After not walking or moving much for one hour, the watch will beep and vibrate at me, encouraging me to do about 100 steps to reset it. This is great! It’s a simple reminder that I need to take little breaks during my workday to stretch my legs. It takes about two minutes of walking to reset the inactivity bar. People say sitting is the new smoking, and I won’t argue. Humans aren’t meant to sit at desks for 8-10 hours a day… before going home to sit on a couch for a few more hours. If a little beep and buzz reminds me to spend two minutes moving around, it’s well worth the awkwardness in meetings when during a moment of silence my watch beeps. While the inactivity bar probably only added about 500-1000 steps to my average day, it was the first and most significant change in my routine.

The second way the watch changed me was the heart rate monitoring. When I keep saying I struggled to run in the heat this summer, I have heart rate data to back it up. My heart rate would climb into the 160s and 170s while I was running slower than 8 minutes per mile pace on flat ground, which is ridiculous! That means my body was working really hard to perform a task that under cooler conditions would result in a heart rate in the 130s. While I don’t like the Garmin recovery estimation after a workout because after just about every longer run I do it tells me I need 3-4 days of rest, the constant heart rate monitoring has helped me understand my perceived effort better. In other words, often in running you really need to do workouts at a perceived effort, not a concrete pace, and it’s hard to describe that without using heart rate. I ran with a heart rate monitor a number of times in the past, but not for every run, and especially not for most recovery runs. However, those recovery runs are probably the best time to use the heart rate monitor so that you really do take it as easy as you need.

The third way the watch changed me was through the step counter, by wanting to get in my goal number of steps per day. Typically when I run this isn’t an issue, but some days when I only do a few miles, it is, and I have to take an evening walk to reach my goal. While I have always enjoyed walks, this has given me some extra motivation to actually go out and put in 2000 steps after supper. 

The final way the watch has affected me, although I would not say it has changed me like the first three, is health metrics like sleep tracking and resting heart rate tracking. I don’t really do anything with the information, other than use it for confirmation bias that yes when I am averaging 7 hours of sleep over the past week I might need more rest, or when my resting heart rate dips below 45 yes I am indeed in okay shape.

I realize that the three benefits that I mention can be had on a watch without GPS and bluetooth connectivity to a smartphone, so you don’t need to go out and spend this kind of money on a activity tracker, in fact, it’s overkill if you don’t plan to use the GPS or the continuous heart rate monitoring. After all, I did use the thing to the top of Mt. Everest, and I’m pretty sure that of the tens of thousands of people that have bought the watch so far, I was the only one to really put it through it’s paces on top of the world. 

As a footnote, I’m writing this now because Apple Watch Series 2 came out not too long ago and now that GPS is internal, it can do all of the same that my Garmin FR235 watch does, and more, although the GPS time seems to max out at 5 hours, versus 11 for my FR235, which is a big difference for a person like me. I like getting text messages to my watch, and notifications for flights or weather. While I never used to wear a watch, now seems to be the time when having a smart watch seems reasonable. I imagine in about two years when the next generation of Garmins and Apple Watch are released, I will be totally sold on wearing a watch all the time the rest of my life, which is just not something I did the first 29 years. A watch was a tool for my running and mountaineering, but wasn’t incorporated into my life the way it is now. Of course... this could change as I grow and change.

PLUTO!!

For the first time in the history of humans, and likely the last time in my life, a human spacecraft flew past our former ninth planet! Growing up, for my generation, there were nine planets, four rocky inner ones and four gas giant outer ones, and Pluto. Then in 2005 they started to discover others like Pluto, in similar orbits of similar sizes, and some even have moons. However, call it nostalgia, but growing up there were nine planets. 

Due to orbital mechanics, which I did get an A in my sophomore year of college, the speed required to get there in only nine years meant there was basically no way, short of another $300 million dollars or so for fuel, that we could stay for long. So we flew by this morning at 30,800 miles per hour. We have the best full frame photo already, it was sent back before the closest approach in case the spacecraft hits something and we lose everything else. Fortunately there is much more to come, 99% of the science will be sent back over the next 16 months, and we will learn so much more about the composition of Pluto and Charon. As I write this New Horizons sent the all safe signal this evening, meaning it did not hit anything during the fly by! 

New Horizons was launched while I was in college, getting my aerospace engineering degree. It is kind of "my" mission. It's the one on a shoestring budget, going to a far away place, with just a couple days to do 95% of the work. It's like going to climb a new route on an unmapped island that presumably has climbing routes. It's exploration. 

Honestly, just go directly to the source, most of the images are posted when they are received and commentary of the scientists help explain what we are looking at: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu

What We Don't Know, That We Think We Know

In 100 years will society look back on us as simpletons the way we like to think of our ancestors 100 years ago?

In business, just like in a foot race or climbing a mountain, we are constantly making decisions based on limited information. That is part of the excitement. There is a thrill to stepping into the unknown when you think it is going to go well, but you don't really know. However, using mountaineering as a perfect example, sometimes a serac falls down and kills 16 people climbing up to Everest camp one. They thought they were simply going to hike up to camp one April 18th, 2014.

In business companies go bankrupt when enough wrong decisions are made. Kodak invented digital photography. Empires rise and fall. Rome fell. Runners win medals and set records, and then get busted for doping scandals. All the while people are suffering and dying in South Sudan yet no one really knows or cares.

A former supervisor of mine once said, "everyone thinks he or she is the smartest person in the room." I think about that fairly often. There is nothing new under the sun. We are no smarter now than our ancestors 100 or 1000 years ago. We simply have a huge knowledge base that is accessible now, so we're solving different problems.

In 100 years or 1000 years from now, if the world is still around, our descendants will certainly wonder why we did some things and didn't do other things that in hindsight seem obvious.

Summer 2015 Space Exploration!

Wow! What a summer! Dawn at Ceres, Rosetta and Philae at a comet perihelion! And my favorite, New Horizons at Pluto! All were launched in the previous decade, and all have now reached their primary mission. In addition to the mission websites linked above, the planetary society is writing timely and detailed updates on the missions.

Dawn is the first spacecraft to visit Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. There are several very bright spots on Ceres which have drawn quite a bit of interest. Frankly, no one knows what they are.

Rosetta is not the first spacecraft to visit a comet, but certainly has the best camera so far. Plus, Philae, a little 100 kg lander successfully landed on the comet last fall and have enabled us to study comets far more than any previous mission.

New Horizons was the most significant, in my opinion, space probe to launch while I was in college, getting my aerospace engineering degree. We've never sent anything to Pluto, and our knowledge of Pluto is very vague. Only a few years ago in 2011 and 2012 did we discover the fourth and fifth moons of Pluto.

Just a note on orbital mechanics, in order to get to Pluto in only nine years, we can't really afford the fuel to slow down the trajectory and stay there. It's going something like 13.77 km/s, 30,800 miles per hour. The fuel required to slow down would cost hundreds of millions of dollars so the spacecraft was built without large fuel tanks to save money and designed to simply make a flyby.

We're Landing on a Comet!!

On a technicality, the European Space Agency did a really nice job with their entire website, especially the Rosetta portion and the Rosetta blog. Check out the ESA's Rosetta Blog awesome website.

This is like the Olympics plus the Superbowl Plus the Kentucky Derby Plus Wimbledon of astrodynamics, or planetary mechanics. To actually land on something with an escape velocity of 1 meter/second, is like trying to find a nail in your back yard with an ordinary compass. I reguarly run 4 m/s, so for me to run or jump off of the comet would be easy.

Anyway, check it out, hopefully by this afternoon we will touch down and by tomorrow we might have a couple pictures from the surface of a comet. Then, as the comet nears the sun I'm expecting quite a show!

We Failed on Most Early Space Missions

I have been rewatching a great Discovery Channel miniseries: "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions". 

We failed so many times. Gemini 8 Neil Armstrong almost died due to a thruster misfiring. While Ed White's first spacewalk went really well, the next three attempts were failures until Buzz Aldrin decided to train in a pool. Then there were the computer errors from Mercury to Apollo, even minutes before the first landing on the moon, "1202!... 1201!"

I have watched the series several times, it's really good. Yet I seriously did not realize until tonight how often we failed in the early years. Sensors failed. Control systems gave the wrong angles. It's amazing that it took until 1986 for a rocket with Americans to blow up at launch, I mean Orbital Sciences just had one blow up this week. SpaceX I think had their first three rockets blow up and Elon Musk gave a speech to the team at the time saying there was only money for one more shot, and they succeeded! 

In my short engineering career I have learned that development is like that. We try something, hopefully it works, but inevitably it fails. You might be stunned to know that billions of dollars a year are spent on products and prototypes that are inevitably scrapped or left to rust or simply destroyed as examples of insufficient designs. There are no perfect designs, although some are clearly better than others. 

The moral of the story is it is okay to fail. Preferably fail fast and fail early although anytime you try to do something new, it will be hard.

Rosetta and Philae Spacecraft (The Coolest Thing in Space Right Now)

Check out this image, taken only 16 miles from a comet last week. Definitely the coolest thing happening in space right now is about to happen in November, we are landing on a comet!

We land on Mars and even moons of Jupiter, and of course our moon, however, in some respects, they are all easier than a comet. Something that is only 1.5 miles long and 2.5 miles wide has very little gravity. That means it's difficult to get to and stay on. Honestly, you might be able to jump off of it. Your legs might have that much delta V that you could launch yourself off the comet. For humans to walk on a comet would be incredibly difficult, that's part of the reason a robot can do this mission so well.

It is going to be interesting!

Women in Engineering and Technology

First of all, my sister is an engineer, and it's just the two of us kids in our family. So if what I say comes off sexist or racist, I'm probably more feminist than my sister, and for the record, being an even mildly feminist man doesn't help at all wooing the ladies. My sister just wrote a blog post on being a woman in engineering and it inspired me to write this. Only about one in seven engineers is female and that has pretty much been her experience.  As for the racist part, you are welcome to call me racist if you want, but then again I'm trying to start Sustainable South Sudan, and you're not helping me. I am afraid that whatever I say as a white American male, anything I say will come off racist and sexist. Hey, I didn't pick my parents. On the other hand, and the reason I am going through with publishing this, if I don't talk about it, how will we ever encourage more women, and minorities, to get into engineering and technology?

I have been thinking about this for some time since Google released it's employment demographics a few weeks ago. When I first heard that Google was 30% female I was stunned! I was amazed! I thought, 'how in the world did they get so many women?!' It was roughly the same for their ethnicity, I thought, 'only 61% white?! Where did they get all the other ethnic groups?' That being said, 30% Asian actually makes a lot of sense between Japanese, Indian, and Chinese citizens or descendants. I think my reaction was actually somewhat opposite the mainstream media's reaction to "diversity" in the technology sector.

Since I originally wrote this post, I was letting it simmer so that I had time to revise it again before I publish. In the last week Yahoo came out with it's diversity numbers. Once again, the details, directly from Yahoo, are not actually that surprising to me. Basically 15% of the technical staff is female.

The company I work at is roughly the same person count size as Google, and from my experience has far fewer than 30% women. In my limited experience it seems we have about 10% women, but my experience is nearly all direct engineering, not marketing or supply management or manufacturing. When I was part of the FEA group, we had one woman, out of like 40 employees. How's that, a 2.5% ratio? For the record, it's a little hard to directly compare statistics at a place of work when accounting for contractors and contingent personal, also for a global company like mine with several working groups split into several countries but effectively reporting to the same person. Now, it's not that 40 people in several different countries actually report to the same person, but effectively they do. Global organizations are complicated to say the least. Yet as W.L. Gore has shown, clear organization is not necessary to stay in business. The point being, of those 40, maybe only 10 (including the one woman) would show up in the official statistics because the rest are contractors or work in a different company and have a different official reporting structure.

In college in my aerospace engineering class of 2008, I think of about 40 graduates three were women. Those are approximate, because I'm not 100% sure who was aerospace versus mechanical engineering with aerospace concentration, but you get the picture. Materials science was very different, maybe 30-40% women, pretty stunning actually. In my graduating class at semester there were only two of us, and the other graduate was a woman. These are all anecdotal of course, your experience in engineering and technology will vary of course.

Why is it this way? Well, first of all, I think that there will never be an equal 50% split between men and women in science, technology, engineering and math fields. I feel that way because I know enough women and their husbands, and a lot of women make the decision to stay home and raise the kids. Yes I know two stay at home dads too, but they are in the minority. Still, why is it not 45%/55% women to men or at least 40%/60%? There were always more girls than boys in my high school advanced classes like calculus and college biology and physics. In fact, in my high school physics class of about 18 people, only two of us were male. Why did the two of us go into engineering while I think all the ladies in that class went into less technical careers? I feel that it has to do predominately with cultural expectations, and to a lesser extent the college support structure. Men are engineers that go to the office and do math, by themselves, and sit at a desk. Women work with people and collaborate in team environments, like a nurse on staff. Honestly, I think that cultural expectations are the major reason for the disconnect. There is also an attitude of competition in science and engineering, not necessarily direct, but the curriculum is tough and teaches you how to solve problems. A lot of people, men and myself included, often dove into the work alone for hours at a time, and while obviously working in teams and getting help from others is necessary, I am afraid that women see the system and don't want to do the solitary number crunching that college presents as "engineering". Now, actually in industry as a design engineer I spend probably 15 hours a week in meetings, another 10 hours a week talking to people informally about my projects, and then maybe 15-20 hours a week actually doing work at my desk. It is so different than college, there is very little on your own technical work, at least in my view. Design engineering is more like art meets sales. We create some art and then try to sell it to the rest of the team, making changes as they recommend until it is very functional art.

On the college support side, classes are not like the real world. There are similarities, but the differences are dramatic. I am afraid that throughout the formal college education process many possible engineers are not supported well enough. In other words, people skills don't get you strait A's in an engineering college, but they might get you CEO in a company.

I should really have high school job shadows now, because some days I feel like all I do is go to meetings and talk to people, Thursdays especially. True story, today I was running a machine in the morning to show a function to some South Koreans then in the afternoon I was running an impact gun changing worn bolts on one of the designs I am responsible for. I always enjoy asking women in engineering how we can get more women in engineering. I mean, I think in some small way I helped motivate my sister into it and I would like to get more women to try out science and technology. The way I think of it is, with an engineering degree, you can teach school, you can go to medical school, you can get an MBA, you can go to law school, you can start a business, and oh yeah, you can be an engineer too. Without an engineering degree, you certainly can't engineer, and chances are your degree will be much more limiting.

A standard argument for a liberal arts degree is that it expands your mind and shows you different ways to think about things, no one says that about a science or engineering degree, but those people obviously haven't sat through Compressible Fluid Dynamics or Intermediate Physics Mechanics II, not to mention studying relativity. I'm biased of course because I have two engineering degrees. I feel that there should be more engineers in the world. We get stuff done. Science is just amazing! Gears for example are simply fascinating.

Looking forward, I won't always engineer. At some point I would like to teach. I also have some other career goals which don't involve engineering. Yet, engineering is fulfilling, and often social, and there is no other education path which I feel would have developed my career and progressed my life like engineering has. For those of you that think, 'people like me don't go into science, technology, engineering, or math.' We want you! We want you to come to our meetings and say something we had not thought of, yet was actually realistic.

Yet Another Setback (MCL Injury)

The best diagnosis I have had for my knee yet is a grade one MCL sprain. I have really only approached one person for a diagnosis. It started hurting slightly a week and a half ago after my 20 miles and four hours of skiing day. I of course ran on it until a 17.6 mile run on very slippery roads made it worse. Who would have guessed?

I feel like an idiot most of the time when I get injured. I mean, signs clearly point to something in my body not working right, and I push it to the end of the workout, maybe even multiple days. I know, I know! That an ounce of prevention is better than the pound of cure that will have to be applied later, yet I struggle to take that first step and admit it is more than just a bruise. Soreness and discomfort are part of the sport. I have a friend who just had hip surgery on his labrum in his hip. Apparently it was like that for 10-20 years. A fantastic runner, reduced to not even going to his desk job, and using crutches for a problem that might have been diagnosed 10 years ago. We work to deal with the pain. We aim to ignore the senses in our body that say "stop!"

I am quite confident I will be fine in a month when I set off for Everest, but it's not the setback I wanted at this point. I had plans of some long, big back to back 6+ hour workout days of running and hiking. Maybe they will still happen, but putting in 30-40 miles two days in a row sounds a little hard right now when a two mile run is painful and even walking a mile involves some pain.

In a perfect world, of soft trails and dry pavement, running would not stress the side of your knee. When a person runs, of the maybe 200 Newtons per step, or 200 to 300 Newtons (an even better article) that go into horizontal forces, from my experience maybe 1-10 Newtons when running in a strait line are lateral forces. In other words, between 0.5% and 5% of the force that your left foot puts into horizontal motion probably pushes your body to the right. However, at 180-190 steps per minute it is only about 0.30 seconds before your right foot pushes back the other direction. The better the runner and more efficient and more experienced generally the lower the percentage of horizontal force is put into lateral motion. However, vertical forces are 5-10 times higher than horizontal forces (5 times at faster speeds and 10 times as slower speeds). Thus, if my left foot ends up just 2 centimeters farther to the left as I push off due to sliding on snow and ice that 1 or 2 Newtons of horizontal energy going into my left leg gets a portion of the 2,000 Newtons of formerly horizontal force that amounts to roughly 40 Newtons. Alone, 40 Newtons won't break my MCL. However, put in half a dozen skiing falls the week before, some asymmetrical running around an indoor track, and a 17.6 mile run on very snowy and icy conditions, and I have significant pain.

Let's say that I encountered that extra 40 N on a meager 10% of the steps I took. At 180 steps per minute and a 132 minute run that's 1188 sliding steps with my left foot adding a whopping 47,520 N into my MCL, which it would not normally encounter. How much is 47,520 N? That is about 10,682 lbs. or close to 10 lbs. more per step into a ligament that was not meant to take that kind of damage.

Our bodies are not invincible, but we can tolerate a lot of damage. I probably put roughly five tons of added stress into a little fiber in my body and I still ran four miles the next day.

I'm a believer in fate and purpose, even though that purpose often makes utterly no sense to us whatsoever! This happening to me now, it's a lesson I need to learn about strengthening myself laterally. It's a lesson about listening to my body when it is saying something is wrong. Why I have to learn (or rather relearn) this lesson so close to one of the greatest physical challenges of my life is beyond me. I am humbled again.

My First Dental Filling

It finally happened, 27.5 years of no dental work, aside from cleanings and check-ups, ended with a couple fillings on my lower back teeth. For some reason my lower teeth have worn faster than my upper teeth, no one has had a good idea why yet. The best I can come up with is I drank too many sugary drinks for so long.

It's depressing, first having anything done to my teeth. Second, now it feels like I have a lump of cement on top of my teeth, however I can't "feel" it like I do my normal all real teeth. Third, enamel and dentin are two rather simple structures when it comes to the human body, we can't develop a paste or veneer sort of matrix that promotes regrowth? (They are actually working on such things around the world.) As the saying goes, "an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure" and it could refer to both more bushing and eating less sugar instead of a filling, or getting a filling instead of a root canal or whole new tooth. Either way, I could do better. Less sugar, more brushing and flossing, more vegetables, and more calcium, it's a simple list, but aw with any endeavor, easier said than done.

Preservation, Conservation, Exploitation

There is a small continuum of possible ways to use land. On the one hand is preservation, do not disturb the land at all. On the other hand is exploitation, get every little bit of value out of the land as possible. In the middle is conservation. Using the land for productive capacities, but aiming not to deplete it and thus lose one's livelihood. In graph form:

Preservation, Conservation, Exploitation

That's the spectrum of how to use land, energy, and just about all material objects. The examples I give below the line are only that, examples. I realize that calling farming "sustainable" (in quotes) may rile some readers but it is worth noting that we aren't entirely sure the century long results of our environmental impact, specifically when it comes to agriculture in the midwest United States. Also, listing Superfund sites as anything other than pure exploitation may make others angry, but the fact is many superfund sites are successfully reclaimed to nontoxic levels.

Every person has an opinion on where we should stand on average in the world. The truth is the world is finite. It is very big, and has a lot of resources to offer, and gets bombarded with more sunlight, adding energy every day, yet it is finite. I tend toward the preservation side of conservation, but I know what materials my cellphone and laptop require, which come from open pit mines and future Superfund sites, and I recognize those are a fact of our world. Yet I worry that the impact we have on Earth right now may not be realized for decades or centuries to come, and for that reason I suggest we attempt to reduce our consumption of resources and enhance our use of more renewable resources. Land use and land management, not to mention energy use and management or resource use and management, are complicated topics. No one person has all the answers. I simply want to point out there is a spectrum of opinion and use of land, energy, and resources and with a continually growing global population more tough choices will be demanded in the future. For your own good, and the health of us all, think about this now in your own life before someone else makes the choices for you.

Utopian or Dystopian?

I listened to a segment about how we interact with robots, and it was not comforting. I encourage you to listen to the TED talks linked above, you will better understand the background. Secondly, unemployment has not been under 7.5% in more than four years. It strikes me that automation is taking over people's jobs. Next will be truck drivers. Seriously, by 2020 I expect driving to be very automated. At least by 2030 it will be mainstream. There is another 3-4 million people out of work.

The people creating these innovations have the dream of a utopian future. One where we can pursue recreation, relationships, athletics, travel, and not 60+ hour work weeks. While that is good in theory, and I would like to see it, I feel that we are getting there through dystopian progress. I mean, with the pace of innovation and automation humans are being replaced faster than new industries are created for employment. In other words, every major innovation in history has left formerly skilled people unemployed. We no longer have a horse doctor or black smith to fix our horses, we have mechanics to fix our cars. We don't have humans pick cotton by hand, we have big machines that harvest it. We don't harvest ice in the winter and store it all summer, we have freezers and refrigerators.

I see this as scary, because even with a master's degree I realize that someday what I do now will be automated. It will be 10-15 years after cars drive us everywhere, but my job is a series of choices and assumptions, which could realistically be automated. This isn't simply about truck drivers being replaced, it's about kids learning better from tablets than teachers, engineering done more consistently and with more optimized products when done by a machine, and banking done entirely by software.

My concern is how people who become unemployed because of their job being automated are to get paid? Turbotax put thousands of tax accountants out of work, and made one man a millionaire. The people at Google (or someplace else) will put millions of truck drivers out of work, while hiring a fraction of that number of people to provide continuous support to automated driving. My solution is either private industries pay large numbers of people salaries just to be on call in case of an emergency (with some sort of stipulation that they do a certain amount of continuing education), or the government provides some sort of basic minimum income to everyone. Of course we aren't really close to either happening. It will be a couple decades before engineering is automated the way I envision it. Unemployment would probably have to creep up to 20% or something before companies and governments realize that humans are being replaced like never before in the last 160 years of mechanization.

We don't really know what will happen. Hopefully I'm viewing the future and automation pessimistically. We will just have to get there one day and one hour at a time.

Median Versus Average

Median is not average. In fact, given typical power law distributions such as long tails the median is often lower than average.

Given a set of one mile race times: 4:14, 4:35, 4:41, 4:44, 4:49, 4:53, 4:58

The average is the sum of those times. If they are added together you get 1974 seconds. The average is 4:42.

The median is the middle time. The guy who has 50% ahead of him and 50% behind him. In this case that is 4:44.

In other words, being the "average" or "above average" at something, like running, income or drinking alcohol, often means much more than the median.

Health Update

Wednesday at work they had complimentary health screening for most of the people here onsite. So I signed up at the last minute Tuesday. Given that fasting was required that means that I took a late slot and did not eat anything except some black coffee until 11 AM! How healthy am I by the numbers?

Cholesterol:
Total: 201 mg/dl                          (Goal: less than 200, marginal: less than 240)
HDL: 100 mg/dl                        (Goal:  greater than 60)
TC/HDL Ratio: N/A                    (Goal:  less than 3)
LDL: N/A                                    (Goal:  less than 150)
Triglycerides: 63 mg/dl                 (Goal:  less than 130)
In short, the total was a little high, but that is because my good cholesterol is so good. In fact, my good cholesterol is so high the machine could not even calculate two of my health numbers!

Blood Glucose:
Glucose: 77 mg/dl                         (Goal: 70 to 99 mg/dl)

This is good news because my family has a history of diabetes. So far, 26.75 years without diabetes!

Blood Pressure:
Blood Pressure: 126/86 mmHg     (Goal: less than 120/less than 80)
Pulse: 55 beats/minute                  (Normal is 60-100 BPM)

My blood pressure was high. Perhaps the highest it has ever been, no there was that one time at the doctor's last year. Why was it high? I have been a little stressed out with drama lately. Plus, I had not eaten anything in 14 hours. It would be good for me to find new ways to relieve stress. My record low blood pressure is 90/60 the summer after I graduated high school. It would be nice to hit that again. My pulse was pretty good considering that I had been awake for more than five hours. I am regularly below 50 when I wake up in the morning.

Body Composition:
Body Mass Index: 21                 (Goal: 18.5 to 24.9)
Body Fat: 14%                          (Goal: 8.0 to 19.9%)
Waist Circumference: 30 inches  (Goal: <40 inches="" p="">Height: 65 inches (without shoes)
Weight: 131 pounds (with clothing and wallet but without shoes)

Umm, I'm fit. The nurse said she had never seen 14% body fat. On the other hand, I'm looking at that and thinking I can lose 5 pounds. Eight to ten percent body fat sounds more like a goal to me than simply being fit in the middle of the range. Pretty excited about the height, this is only the second time to be measured at 5' 5" without shoes but I'm not surprised. Both my dad and an uncle had small growth spurts in their mid 20s and my feet have grown a bit the last two years.

Overall, I'm the guy you want to insure. My health plan is basically to live to be at least 90, go set an age group world record for the 90+ division, then die. Invest in yourself. You are a ten million dollar machine or more, don't ruin the machine through lack of maintenance. 

Finite Element Art

Sometimes I work on a project and "all of by sudden," to quote a professor of mine, something appears that looks really cool. Take a look for yourself:

Finite Element Bolt Simulation

A coworker and friend pointed out to me a few weeks ago that I spend all of my time looking at the same eight colors. Sometimes they are all distributed in a way that is simple aesthetic.

To give you an idea of what you are looking at, the lowest part of the bolt is the part with thread engagement. The middle section we machine to a smaller diameter for testing purposes and that is the area we are most concerned about. Finally the top is unchanged from a normal bolt. Yes, it is science and engineering, but it is art too.

Time Independent Education!!

I am way behind on my Coding Together iOS programming class! Close to three weeks behind. However, that's acceptable. It is acceptable because there is no grade for me when I finish, there is no tuition bill or next semester I need this prerequisite for. For the first time I can remember, there is no deadline for me to learn the material. There is no penalty for not learning the material by a certain time.

This is revolutionary. I'm serious. Kids sit through class for years learning the same material as a whole bunch of other kids because a teacher doesn't have the time to have 25 students all on a different page of the text book. Every so often a kid skips a grade or gets held back to repeat the lessons again. However, perhaps instead of maintaining a constant rate of learning, or a generally constant rate of learning because not all classes progress at the same rate, the rate of learning would depend on the student.

For example, given about four (12 hour) days if I were to just work on my iOS class I could complete the whole thing, except for the final project. However given the plethora of other things that I do with my time it will end up taking me three months or more. That is fine because the end result is nearly the same.

Extrapolate that to a high school trigonometry class. Perhaps there is a series of lectures, better yet interactive lectures, out there that could be used as material for the class. Students could progress with the lessons and assignments at their own rate and the teacher would be able to help students one or two or three at a time as each one needed help. Obviously there would be some bar, some set of minimum requirements, that grades would be based on. However, it allows students to go ahead if they had the time and motivation. Looking back the computer science classes I had and CAD (computer aided drawing) classes I had followed this kind of format. After a short lecture there would be an exercise to work through and some students would finish it before class was over, others would have to work on it after hours as homework. That is still like the tip of the iceberg. It allows the students to progress at their own rate, but every class like that I have had had limits on the material. It's like a text book with 300 pages that takes a year to get through. Well, some students could go through 500 pages in a year. Plus, different students are good at different subjects. If a student gets bored, even for a little bit, the chances of losing the interest of that person for more education grow.

This is on my mind because of the class I am taking, as well as the upcoming McGraw-Hill Education spinoff. As it turns off McGraw-Hill has a large office in Dubuque by the Mississippi as well as a printing operation on the west side of town. I feel that we are in the midst of an education revolution. I don't where where we will end up or if it will be better than what we have now. I don't know how long it will take or if we will go kicking and screaming or running and jumping. I do think that it will mean customized instruction for each student or at least for many different types of students. Kind of like the Star Wars clone army or Star Trek Vulcans. Education will no longer be primarily pages of written text (I'm predicting the death of my blog I suppose) but interactive experiments, even if they are mostly digital.

The Internet has changed things. It may have taken 25 years for us to have an idea of how to use it, but the sharing of information and the connecting of people sharing that information seems to be a major theme. Especially now that we have all of this information accessible from our phones and we have applications that we can touch that react to our actions.

These thoughts have been brewing in me for some time. I feel it is all about the next generation. That's part of the reason I coach. That's why I worked four summers at Boy Scout camp. I want to tell others about the great things I have discovered. So I plan to do more education on my blog going forward. The plantar fasciitis and shins splints thing is an example of what I have to share. It's not perfect. I would only call it semiprofessional, but it is a little more information that others can use to improve the world.

I Live in Iowa: Week 67

Another week in the books! Life is really interesting the farther you go. What I mean by that is that there are things worth learning or doing (two good verbs...) that take time. With all of the frustrations that I had over the last couple months a lot of questions came up, such as, ‘am I where I am supposed to be?’ I think the answer for that, at least now, is yes. Going forward the answer to the next question you might be thinking is yes, there is more to be done here.

The longer I spend making pretty pictures on the computer the more and more I think of myself as an artist rather than a technician. I suppose that science or rather scientists, are really just people experimenting trying to figure out how the world works. It is easy to get into the routine of going through the motions producing a product similar to the last product but never really trying something different. Well, I tried something different this week. I have been working on a window simulation and there is an ISO standard that we have to meet. The design I tested easily met the criteria, but I started to wonder, what else could be thrown at this thing? Having seen bullet simulations or at least slow motion bullet impacts on Mythbusters, I decided to try it myself. Pretty cool stuff! I won’t give away the results suffice it to say the window I tested can stop some rifle bullets, but not all. I call it art. 

It was quite hot this week here in Dubuque. The temperature was over 100F Wednesday and for the local bicycle ride only three people showed up, one of them being the bicycle shop owner, another the guy going to Colorado in a few weeks with the bicycle shop owner making sure he is in shape, and yours truly. When it comes to bicycling in the heat it’s pretty easy, drink a lot and easy off the pace a little. Since you can carry bottles on the bicycle there is no reason to suffer. I think I totaled 87 mile or so for the week. 

Somehow I managed to run 37 miles this week. I’m not sure where all of that came from. It was a fantastic week of running! I ran all seven days (my streak at the moment is 11 days). The highlights are that I did a few strides and Saturday I got out on Heritage Trail for the first time in over a month for a 10 mile run including a four mile tempo. The tempo was nothing special, only 23:27, which is pretty slow considering it’s net downhill.  Still, you don’t really know what you had until you lose it, and every little setback that I have reinforces how wonderful a day like that is. I mean the temperature was a modest 75F there was no wind, I had my morning coffee and then went and cranked out ten miles in just over 63 minutes. That kind of event, considering what I went through with the despair of my foot injury, is enough that I was a little emotional afterward. There was a relief, a desire to cry a tear or two, that I was able to do it again. Of course, I must add that those emotions were mixed with the desire to start getting back into serious training and setting some personal records. I think it’s going to be half marathon season in the fall, and perhaps back to the track in indoor again. 32:12 and 15:44 are nice, and much better than my PRs were, but they are really not good enough to expect a 2:18.

My Coding Together class is going well. I’m still behind and if it were graded I would be failing, but that’s kind of the point of these free online classes in my view. An opportunity to learn something from a skilled professional in an area that may not be your specialty without the financial pressure of failing in a given timeframe and the opportunity to continue at a slower pace if need be. That’s part of the reason I picked WPI as my college. The No Record (NR) on your transcript if you received below a C providing the opportunity to try something you might normally try. I never NR’d a class but I did get a C in a couple classes that I didn’t need to take but was interested in, like chemical thermodynamics. Plus that class set me well for rocket and aircraft propulsion and phase transformations. 

In the Oooooooo China is cleaning up the medal count especially the golds. I have not watched much yet because we have not really gotten to the events I enjoy the most. 

Of NASA note, the Mars Science Laboratory is set to touch down on Mars in a week. This is really interesting because this thing is huge and loaded with equipment compared to everything that has previously been sent to Mars. When it comes to Mars, this is the most exciting thing to happen to it yet. Let’s hope the 500,000 lines of code landing sequence works without a glitch and they don’t crash the one ton rover into a pile of rubble! This video form NASA, is worth your time (and tax dollars).

I started this blog on a whim on a weeknight in graduate school when my two other roommates were home. I did not spend long at all coming up with the title, yet learning and doing are such great verbs. Especially do. The performing of an action. A change of the state of a situation. I respect do. I respect done. It takes courage to do something, I often do nothing when I should take action. For that that have done something, congratulations!

It's About Time Colorado Burned

Forests are burning in Colorado this summer. That should not come as a surprise to anyone who has spent much time in the forests and learning about the forests the last ten years. In fact, I'm surprised it has taken so long. Two things in the past have reached peak levels and I would expect more fires over the course of the next decade because of those things.

1. Smokey the Bear (see the "Fire Ecology" section near the bottom) told us we could prevent forest fires. That is not true. We are good at postponing them, but prevention is a myth. For the last hundred years we have cherished our forests and watched them grow slower than paint dries. Now we have a lot of wood sitting around. More wood means when a crown fire (see "Fuel Type" section) starts there is more fuel to keep it going and resist efforts to stop it. Fires happen, wether it's every 20 years or 300 years, they happen. Forests often have an optimum density range beyond that most Western US forests dry up fast.
2. As a consequence of the first reason the forests became very crowded. The Bark Pine Beetle (a native species, not introduced) infested millions of trees and killed most of them. In other words, if they trees are not cut down or burned, beetles will kill them. 

When you add those two contributing factors together you have the highest density of dead trees that has ever existed in the Western US in modern history. It's a bomb waiting to go off. 

This did not happen overnight either. Philmont Scout Ranch where I worked in 2005 and 2006 has been doing TSI, Timber Stand Improvement, and meadow encroaching since I started working there in 2005. For at least the last seven years they have been doing something to mitigate the risk of tragic losses. 

It is an interesting time, because I feel that we have the opportunity for a more positive forest management strategy going forward. It is also, hopefully, a one time opportunity for large amounts of bark pine beetle wood, which I think looks classy. Additionally, for people that have never visited a forest a few years after it burns, I highly encourage it. You will appreciate a mature forest more after the experience.

The next few decades promise to be interesting ones for the forests of the Western half of this country.

Doubling The Rate of Failure

Ryan Hall had a blog post recently about things he knows about running now that he didn't understand a decade ago. One of those (#4) is that if you want to succeed more you need to put yourself out on a limb and fail more. It's a really interesting to articulate that. People do not like to fail. Yet it is our failures that we learn from.

I took apart my motorcycle down to the carburetor and everything looked like it worked well, yet when I put it back together it leaked again. Fortunately there is a fuel line I can easily switch off. So it looks like I will be remembering to switch off the fuel line every time I park just in case the carburetor decides to leak.

The problem has not been solved, but I know quite a bit more about how my motorcycle works. In the process I learned how carburetors work and I cleaned out my rusty (the guy who sold it lied) gas tank. Not a simple process. It is all progress.

The same thing happened at work. I was progressing through a project the way I always do, which errors on the conservative side. Then I ran into a problem that required more detail. Doing my analysis the way I have done it in the past shall not acquiesce this time.

Hopefully my foot does not really follow along those lines because I do not think that you need to get injured pursuing an endurance sport in order to have success. Most successful athletes will experience significant setbacks, and learn from them, but injury is certainly not a prerequisite to train injury free.

I just restarted a project that has been on hold for just over a year. I will need some help. It will probably fail anyway. This is some good stuff I am working on. Stay tuned. If you want to help send me an email. It will require in the neighborhood of 5-10 hours.

If Edison failed about 3000 times and succeeded only twice in the light bulb endeavor then I can certainly stand to fail more.

I Recommend Eating out of Ceramics

Materials come in three general classifications: metals, polymers (plastics), and ceramics. The differences between the three different materials has to do with the molecular structure.

• Metals are characterized, in part and in general, by electrical conductivity, which means the electrons in the material are able to move relatively freely. Due to the movement, the diffusion, within the metal of the atoms and electrons metals are generally very ductile, bendable. Unfortunately, aluminum has been linked to Altzheimers and iron overdose can be a fatal problem. Metal is awesome but too much of it in your body can be a bad thing.
• Polymers are characterized by chains of mer units, thus the name poly-mer means many mers. The difficulty with polymers is that chemicals are used to join the mer units together. Bisphenol-A which has been linked to a slew of bad diseases caused quite the uproar a few years ago. No matter how stringent the cleaning process, some of the catalyzing chemical, like Bisphenol-A will remain in the polymer. If it was possible to create and isolate a single long chain of a polymer it would be an incredibly strong nano wire. That is in fact how climbing ropes and ropes used for shipping and industrial setting are so strong. The polymer is continuous from one end of the rope to the other.
• Ceramics are something in between. They are very orderly like polymers yet they exist in bulk three dimensional organization like metals. Ceramics are not very electlically conductive at room temperature because the electrons around each atom are not free to move about. That means that ceramics are less ductile than metals. This means that the material also is stronger than metals. Think carbon fibers, because they are ceramic. The advantage for eating is that unless a conscious effort is made to scrape and scratch the ceramic, it will not release atoms as easily as metal and it has nothing to leech like polymers.

I recommend ceramic when it comes to eating. Unless you are anemic in which case using cast iron cookware will help boost that iron in your body.