I Did It!

• Woooo! On 03/26/2007 I started at 259. Today I'm at 199.

  That's right, just 1/2 lb per week. Slow and steady catches the worm. In graphical form:

  My BMI is still technically overweight, though. Granted, BMI isn't a very good measure, but in this case I agree with the assessment and I'm going to go for 10 more lbs.



• I've only recently started using multiple colors of clay together. I have an irrational fear of "using up" the clay when I mix it, even though a pound of clay is like $1. However, a clay model gathers impossible-to-remove dust and small nicks. So I've finally bitten the more expensive bullet of switching to sculpey.

  A 4 year old of my acquaintance calls this "the treasure cat" and a 2 year old, also of my acquaintance, calls it "measure cat". (Also, any Cheshire Experts will notice right away the wrong color I didn't notice until too late.)



• I have a scrollsaw from way back but the blade broke and it turns out that that size is hard to find. Then last weekend I found a bandsaw at the flea market! After some tuning and tweaking, it's running great.

  Is this

  the first step on the road to this?

  Doubtful. But maybe!

Happy Modification Of Most Sigificant Digit In Base 10 Representation Day!

I didn't even think to comment when the MSB in base 2 changed. What kind of a NERD am I?

Once my average catches up with the daily weigh-in, I'll be Officially At My (Original) Goal. I think I'm going to aim at another 10 lbs, though.

In other news, I've been messing around with Haskell, but I need a real programming project to really do something. I was thinking about this again.

I realized yesterday that it's not just hard but actually logically impossible to represent a mechanical object physically as a strict tree. Consider even just a triangle of beams. Two of them attach, making them children of the same parent (the joint). The third attaches to both, which is illegal.

A commenter suggested the netlist approach that electronic simulators take. The problem is that the netlist is a genome of the device. I have to be able to take a subset of the genome and swap it out for another piece that also has to drop in place. How does that work without leaving dangling "wires"? I could just leave them there for Nature to work out, but is that going to make success too infrequent for me to have patience for?

I think my algorithmic approach could work. But I haven't really worked it out. In any case, Haskell (or possibly better yet, Tcl or Lisp) is probably a good match. These languages already allow you to run data as code and treat code like data easily. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not sure Haskell does that. What is that property even called?

Artistic Voice, And Poundage, Being Suppressed

You may remember my previous, paradigm-shifting, boundary-pushing art installation. A chance remark from a coworker caused me to think of another. No pictures, sadly, and it only lasted about an hour.

The idea was: The cubbies kind of look like a vertical cross section of an apartment building. So I filled them with doll furniture to simulate different apartments. One had a bed, another a lamp and armchair, another a toilet and sink, etc. There was room for the cellphones to perch on the "floor" but I really intended the phones to live in the apartments--sleep in the beds, sit in the chairs, etc.

Sadly, some humorless nitwit removed it all because some VIPs are coming through. And we all know VIPs will instantly be turned to powder if they crack a smile. (The VIPs canceled a few minutes later, but now I shan't share. Or maybe I will.)

Unrelatedly, my birthday has come and gone and I didn't quite meet the goal of -60 lbs. However, I'm exactly 3.5 lbs short of it and closing fast, so I'm not too disappointed. What's weird is that the stupid Wii doesn't seem to notice. I deliberately wear exactly the same clothes every time I weigh in and have lost at least 2 lbs since it started tracking me, but no. Then again, it cares more about BMI which changes less rapidly than lbs (they are both linear, but I mean numerically).

Incremental Backup

• So far, I've lost about 55 lbs. That's 4 or 5 pant sizes, I think, plus now my winter coat doesn't fit anymore. Naturally my workplace has NOW decided to have a Biggest Loser contest. I could have won one of these fabulous prizes! I'm almost tempted to regain it all so I can lose it for the free iPhone. (Actual prize may vary.)


• The PVC piston idea doesn't work. Or rather, it works really well, but not for high temperatures. Maybe a water pumping thing might work, but otherwise it just gets gummed up with melty yuck. Also using insulation for the displacer is contraindicated as a fire hazard. /turns off smoke alarm. Needless to say, the engine was unsalvageable.


• Because of the above, I'm starting a new engine. For various reasons, probably all stupid, I'm thinking of going rhombic. I sat down the other day to quickly figure out the stroke length given stuff like the gear diameter. Just an easy little geometry problem until my face imploded. Also, finding cots (commercial/off-the-shelf) hardware that can be used for a medium-sized Stirling is non-trivial.


• This cool thing is in free beta. I hope that doesn't mean they are going to charge for it later, because then we won't have future classics like Two Regular Guys.


• I got a Moleskine "square" (i.e. graph) paper notebook for Christmas. Coupled with my mechanical drawing pencils, it is really awesome. I should post some pics of what I've been doing with it.


• Read Clock of the Long Now. It was very interesting and enlightening and life-changing and so forth, but they left out sufficient detail for my geekiness: Details on the mechanism. It's a single-function, mechanical, binary computer. Like the Difference Engine only in binary. Should be a snap to implement in Lego. I even started designing it but I just don't have enough time to do more than that.

Invention Idea #2

Red increases the pulse and heart rate, and raises your blood pressure. It increases the appetite by increasing your metabolism, which is why red is such a popular color in restaurants.

("color red metabolism" gets hits mainly for People Magazine-level science info, so I don't know how well-established or bunked this is.)

The office across the hall from me just got "natural sunshine" fluorescent bulbs put in. They are much whiter than the regular bulbs, which are reddish-orange. It is causing me to wonder what effect constant immersion in red light is having on office workers. Obesity? Or is the above effect only a differential one? Has this even been studied?

Anyway, my invention: blue-tinted "diet" sunglasses.

Apert

• I've been working on various projects but none of them is to the point of being documentable. But I feel like I should update my blog so it doesn't look like I'm dead. So...here I am. I'm a Montharian. (For explanation of this and the post title, see next item)


• I'm "reading" Anathem and it's really great so far. I "read" The Name of the Rose a few months ago and had the idea of scientific monastics then, so I'm a little cheesed off that Stephenson beat me to the punch (not that I was going to write a book, but now I can't talk about how cool it would be without sounding like a fanboi). I've seen some complaints about the made-up words, but I don't think that's really fair. For one thing, a lot of the words like "fraa" and "reticule" aren't made up, they are just less common. For another, shut up.


• Is it just me, or is the YouTube subscription system completely broken? My concept of that list on the front page is that they are supposed to be new, unwatched videos from my subscription list. Instead, they seem to show a random selection of new videos from my subscription list, watched or unwatched, and only one from each subscription. So if, say, New Scientist puts out 3 videos in between visits, I only see the latest one. Why isn't it more like an RSS feed? Or maybe I should use an RSS feed for it?


• Weight loss is still on track to reach my goal by Christmas. I'm such a dork I even wrote a program to calculate some stats, including what day my current trend will have me finishing at. 12/24/2008 so far.


• One of the projects I'm not ready to post about yet involves some electronics running outside. I wasn't comfortable having it plugged in, so I went with a large, rechargeable battery. After getting everything working, I realized
  1. The motors weren't powerful enough
  2. but they were still drawing too much power to allow the battery to last very long
  3. and I bet the battery won't work well in the cold
  Sooo....yeah. Back to the drawing board for at least part of that.

Wooo

• I cracked 50 lb of weight loss today. I'm still on track (±ε) to reach my original goal by Christmas. It also happens to be, as of yesterday, 10 lbs in 100 days, or almost exactly 350 calories/day.
• Pursuant to that, I have made a breakthrough in food reduction technology. One of my favorite meals is...undocumented on this site?! WHAT. Anyway, it involves guacamole. The problem I've had is that I need to make enough to use up an entire avocado, which now that my metamabolism needs fewer calories is a little too much. Avocado turns brown if you look at it funny, so I can't put the excess in the fridge. I also can't throw it away because of the starving children in Africa. However, it turns out to freeze just fine. So now I can make M/Nths of a recipe which not only vastly reduces the hit points but also means I only use M avocados every N days.
• I'm trying to embed a microcontroller into a project that I'll describe more later. All I know is Arduino, so I'm going with that. (I guess I could just use the Atmega chip or however that works, but baby steps, people.) The basic Arduino is a little unwieldy for this, but last night I finished soldering and testing the Really Bare Bones Board. And besides being much smaller and breadboard-compatible, it's also much cheaper because it pushes some of the cost of the unit into a one-time-purchase cable.
• Number One Son, age 9, is trollering me. He just found out about HTML and has made a couple of pages. (With random size changes and font colors, naturally.) He keeps calling the .html file a "program".

Massively Unparalyzed

• I think I'm out of the summer diet doldrums. I suddenly realized that if I stayed focused, I could meet my original goal by Christmas. I have to lose 1 lb every 10 days, which seems pretty reasonable. That's just ~350 calories/day. This is the same rate my overall history has been up til now, so as long as I keep, or *cough* get back on, that average I should be good. (I say "original goal" because after I meet that goal I think I'm going to go an additional 10 lbs. But I'll have to see how things stand when I get there.)


• I needed to sense sunlight vs shadow and I'd read somewhere you can do that using an LED somehow. I got that working but they aren't made for that and so it didn't meet even the low standards of this application. Some photoresistors, even at RadioShack's redonk prices, were only $3 and work so much better.


• Also needed, or at least wanted to evaluate, pulleys. McMaster-Carr's site is so awesome, why can't my local hardware store (or even Lowe's) have a website like that? Or McMaster-Carr have an outlet near me.

  That said, my local hardware store fits an amazing depth and breadth of stuff into their store. I don't think there's been a single thing I couldn't find there that I was able to find at Lowe's, in the fields the LHS covers. (i.e. they don't sell appliances at all, so obviously they have a smaller selection of dishwashers.) And the reverse is not true--I've found things at the LHS that Lowe's didn't have. And they manage to fit all this stuff into an area that's probably literally no larger than the area devoted to just cash registers at Lowe's. Like, how is it possible that my LHS has a 9 ft² caribiners + pulleys display right next to the pumps I need (though are still more than I want to pay)?

  Oh and the staff actually know where things are and how to use them, unlike at Lowe's.

  I guess what I'm saying is, local hardware store:Lowe's::small European country:US. It may be a little more expensive, but the service and selection are great.



• How can I completely waterproof a wooden structure? How about sunproofing? Like, is it going to get baked and shrunken on one side? Probably somebody already knows all this stuff. No wonder people just build with metal. Oh wait, how about PVC? Does that degrade in the sun? Oh and it's hollow, so you can put wires in there....HMMMMM


• I was going to have an entry in here talking about all the things I suddenly (as of this morning!) have to do, but I can't even spend time enumerating them!

Potpourri

• The diet hit a plateau. I'm down by 43 lbs from when I started, but in the last 30 days it's only changed by .5 lb. Looking at the chart from a year ago, I think I see a pattern. It was going down very slowly in May/June 2007, too. Looks like maybe 3 lbs in 60 days.

  There's probably two things going on. First, every year I imagine early summer weight loss should be easy. "Winter hibernation pounds just melt away naturally!" Second, a lot of good, fresh food shows up at the store.



• I used to listen to Pandora at work. The advertised feature, discovery and laser(ish) targetting of your tastes, worked great. The problem was that the selection wasn't so great. I was down to about 30 songs that they just endlessly looped for me. Then I switched to Last.fm. The targetting isn't very good, but the selection is pretty huge. Exhibit A probably says more about how out of the loop I am for just now finding this, but still: Pretty hilarious (Lyrics)


• And speaking of nerds: Do you like math? Do you also like mechanical devices? Then you will probably love How Round Is Your Circle. It's filled with mechanical ways to make, or approximate, mathematical functions, such as for linkages. The main problem with the book is that it's too short. It should really be a set of volumes so he can better explain each item. (Video teasers).


• I have dismantled and cannibalized the Squeezer for a much simpler version of a parabolic trough now in production. Stay tuned!

Boring Diet Update

I'll have something much more exciting in a few days, I think. Well, exciting to a NERD. It involves motors and integers and wires.

A month ago, I mentioned my upcoming dietversary. Today is the last day of Year One. My Official Tally of Weight Lost is 38 lbs. That's an average of ²/₃-³/₄ of a lb per week.

I was half-heartedly shooting for 40 during the last few weeks, knowing I wouldn't make it. But I came pretty close and in the final weeks I doubled my average rate. Also, the Official Tally is based on a moving average, so my last actual weigh-ins have been at or close to exactly 40 lbs. All in all, not at all disappointing.

My original goal was 60 lbs, with a caveat that I may want to go 10 beyond that when I get there (I'm not sure I believe the BMI chart). So I've still got 6 to 9 months ahead of me at this rate. Perhaps by Christmas? Then again, I'm actually chowing on Easter candy as I type this...

Weight Loss Milestones: Past, Present and Future

Past

My time-weighted, moving-average BMI dropped below 30 on the 7th. Also, I had to buy a couple new pairs of pants several months ago.

Present

The new pants are starting to feel a little loose too. And just this morning, I put my belt down another notch. To the last notch. It's a little bit too tight this way, but up a notch is way too loose. "Pants feel a little tight" is a good way to keep from snacking at work.

Future

Looking at my log, I see that it will be a year on March 26. I've dropped 33 lb in that time. Since I need a short-term goal to really get me moving, I thought maybe I'd try to reach 40 lb (2/3 of my original long term goal) by the 25th, but I don't think that's really feasible.

Up until now, I've been short an average of ~350 calories/day. To lose 7 lb in 30 days I'd have to short myself ~800 calories/day. That doesn't sound too healthy. So I don't know what short term goal I can set myself.

Miscellaneous

1. I had a long, long thing here about how following my plan was so easy, but it kept reading like Tighter Buns in 30 Days While Eating Pizza, so let's leave it at this: Down by almost 27 pounds.
2. Way back when, I did some solar experiments. I said I'd come back to that. I'm still working on that. The problem is, the design I came up with is kind of crappy.

   What I want is a parabolic trough mirror focused on a central pipe. I've tried using mylar sheets on various surfaces before, but it didn't come out too well. This time I tried strips of mirror laid in a wooden parabolic form. I haven't tested it yet, but it doesn't look too convincing on the workbench. Lots of gaps, not much total area, not well focused, etc. (No picture, because seriously.)

   While I was wondering what to do about all this, I came across this video. The guy comes across as a little infomercially, but his ideas look pretty good. In particular, I didn't know you could "drape form" plexiglass (aka "acrylic") mirror. That changes everything! Almost zero work and much higher efficiency.

3. Which brings me to the third misc item. WhereTF do you find acrylic mirror at a reasonable price? I've found it as low as $4.50/sqft, but you have to buy at least $50, not to mention shipping. Plenty of ebayers, but the price with shipping never comes out lower than ~$12/sqft and you have to buy several sqft to get that. Lowe's can special order it, but you have to buy 5 48"x96" sheets and it's still $8/sqft. McMaster-Carr, despite their awesome website, doesn't reveal shipping information even if you ask a live human being, which, HELLO.

   This kind of mirror is used in a lot of children's products because it's shatterproof, so I've considered repurposing a baby mirror, but the cost is still pretty high there due to packaging, frames, etc. I've even wandered around Home Depot and Lowe's to see if I could find a bathroom/decorative/whatever acrylic mirror on some other product. The sole success was a really, really crappy medicine cabinet with attached acrylic mirror. The whole unit was $12 and the mirror was 2 sqft.

   I would just go with that, but the fact that it's attached to something else only proves that I should be able to get the mirror alone for cheaper. Also, I hate to buy something specifically so I can throw it away. In the mean time, I ordered a set of these to experiment with. With the shipping, even amortized over several other items in my order, the price per sqft comes out at lalalaicanthearyou.

How To: Lose Weight (And I Don't Even Mention Lettuce!)

First of all, let's define our terms. There's "losing weight" and there's "getting healthy". For the latter, you need to eat carrots and exercise. I'm not too interested in carrots and, while I don't mind incidental exercise, I don't have the time or inclination to run around for no direct reason. This post is solely about making the number on the scale be smaller. That in itself is a great step towards "getting healthy", though, as long as you aren't too stupid about it (i.e. no starvation).

The mantra in diet books is "don't diet--change your lifestyle". Partly this is just a good idea. They don't want you going on a crash diet and then fattening back up. But partly this is making a virtue of necessity. The reason they want you to change your lifestyle is that a non-starvation diet doesn't change your weight fast enough to notice it unless you try it over the long term. That is, if you only drop .4 lbs in a week, are you really going to notice it adding up even over the course of a month, if you last that long? Who is going to remember, to the tenth of a pound, what they weighed 2 weeks ago? The first secret of losing weight: You need to keep a history of your progress to refer back to.

But if you are only losing .4 lbs/week, there's another problem: Noise. The key to controlling a variable to to be able to measure it accurately. Otherwise how do you know if what you are trying is working? But diet books also tell you not to weigh yourself very often. The reason they give for this is that your weight can vary because of non-fat variables. A large meal only partially digested, extra water, etc.

That's really terrible advice, though. For instance, children's test scores vary a lot from child to child, so should you just choose one random child from each school to measure performance? Of course not! If anything, taking fewer measurements increases the noise problem. The way to fix noisy data is to remove the noise. The second secret of losing weight: Noise reduction.

One simple way to remove noise from data is via averaging. Particularly, a "moving average". Let's say I take the following daily measurements:

Mon: 201
Tue: 201
Wed: 202
Thu: 201
Fri: 201
Sat: 202
Sun: 200
Mon: 201
Tue: 200
Wed: 200
Thu: 199
Fri: 200
Sat: 201

Nothing is happening! This diet sucks!!!

But wait, let's try doing a moving average. For each day, we'll average in with the previous two days (which means we have to skip the first two since there aren't two days before them).

Mon: 201 (no avg)
Tue: 201 (no avg)
Wed: 202 (201.3)
Thu: 201 (201.3)
Fri: 201 (201.3)
Sat: 202 (201.3)
Sun: 200 (201)
Mon: 201 (201)
Tue: 200 (200.3)
Wed: 200 (200.3)
Thu: 199 (199.6)
Fri: 200 (199.6)
Sat: 201 (200)

In fact, I lost a pound to 1.3 pounds, depending on where you count from. (There are many ways to doing a moving average, including ways to weight the average more heavily towards more recent measurements. Don't worry about the specific method here.)

The difference between raw and averaged (aka "smoothed") data is even more dramatic if you look at a graph. The circles are (fictitious-but-realistic) readings from the scale. The line is the smoothed average. Some of those weigh-ins differ by as much as 2 pounds in a single day. If you wake up a day after "being good" on your diet and see you weigh 2 pounds more than yesterday, doesn't that make you want to give up? But after you smooth the data, the problem may not be so bad.

In fact, it might not be a problem at all. Say the 3 days you were averaging yesterday were 205,202,201 (202.6). All you ate yesterday was carrots, but today you got 203. The weighted average is still 202, which is down from yesterday's average. How awesome is that!

Answer: Very awesome. But not so awesome we need to make things harder for ourselves. For instance, try to weigh yourself under the same circumstances every time: Same time of day, same state of undress, same fullness of stomach and bladder, etc. Also, I have gotten into the habit of "unofficially" weighing myself at various times throughout the day and I've gotten to know exactly how much to subtract for my clothing, how much water I'll lose via respiration overnight, etc. If I weigh X when I got to bed, I will weigh between X-3.5 and X-3 in the morning, rock-solid. An unofficial weigh-in the evening before can help prevent sticker shock in the morning and will also tell you if you can afford a bowl of ice cream. (That might not work for you.)

But who wants to juggle a bunch of numbers?! That's worse than being fat! Don't worry, you don't have to do a thing. Just head on over to PhysicsDiet. Create a free account, give it some info like your starting weight (you can ignore all the stuff about percent bodyfat and exercise) and away you go. The site handles the moving average and plots pretty charts and everything.

Since I started in late March I've only been losing an average of .44 lbs/wk. That's slow enough that I would have given up after a couple weeks, especially since it's also far less than the noisiness of the data (particularly since my scale only weighs in .5 lb increments). But with the two secrets of losing weight, historical progress and noise reduction, I've managed to lose over 15 lbs so far. Also, there are 3500 calories to a pound of fat, so that's just an average of 220 calories per day, which I barely even notice missing from my plate, let alone do I have to eat carrots and rice cakes. It's like I'm not even dieting (almost).