We are wary of vaccinating our children unnecessarily -read more of my thoughts in this article on Gardasil, but we certainly make sure our kids receive the routine vaccinations. The likelihood of dying in a car crash is so many times that of suffering any side effect of the well tested vaccinations, it seems to us absurd to risk our kids by not getting these done, and not to mention believing there’s a social responsibility – eg the more peopple who can host a measles virus, the more chance of a mutation developing that we aren’t resistant to.
Nonetheless, many people have begun to avoid vaccination, and Measles/Mumps/Rubella in particular, because of a study linking MMR to Autism Spectrum Disorder. I suppose this is a reasonable concern, although you know, living in a house full of gifted people a bit of autism doesn’t scare us! But not only was the link based on a single study, the study has been retracted by the journal that first published it, The Lancet.
Not only were there several outright falsehoods in the paper, and a tiny sample space, Andrew Wakefield, the doctor responsible for the study, has been found guilty of “dishonesty and misleading conduct” during the period of the study, and risks being struck from the medical register for this and other sins. In addition, a year before the study Wakefield applied for a patent for his own measles vaccine, so had a lot to gain from discrediting the existing vaccine.
Sadly, as these articles note, much of the damage has been done and the retraction will probably do little to repair the situation. Search google “measles outbreak” and you’ll find the usual Botswana and Zimbabwe and other third world countries with poor health and vaccination standards, and in the mix you’ll find Ireland in 2010, right here in Victoria in 2009, Sunshine Coast in 2009, England in 2006, all related to decreasing rates of MMR vaccination.
It’s Australia Day, and what better way to celebrate it than making fun of Americans. Just in, the news that out of 185 minutes of broadcast time, there’s just 11 minutes of actual play time in a game of American football.
That’s right, 11 minutes. Players are getting pretty well reimbursed for that. The Wall Street Journal did a frame by frame analysis of recent broadcasts in the US and came up with this stat, averaged across several TV networks. The rest of the time? Well there’s an hour of commercials, and there’s probably a bit of in-broadcast advertising to get through – ‘here’s the RazorCompany close shave plays, brought to you by RazorCompany’ etc - but on top of that the clock in grid iron keeps running when the ball is out of play, so on top of the 11 minutes of actual football, there’s 67 minutes of players mostly standing around. There’s another 17 minutes of replays – yup, more replay than actual game. This is as bad as cricket, but at least nobody is claiming that cricket is exciting. The rest is taken up by things like coaching staff and referees hanging around, with a shocking 3 seconds of cheerleader time.
It would be interesting to do this to other sports. Cricket we’ve already mentioned, but that’s not a fast moving football style game so can be excused. Rugby League would be good, should rate much higher especially in cheerleader time, although there’s a good proportion of ingame advertising in league and you miss plenty of game watching replays. Soccer, lots of play time but still not much action. Aussie Rules would be good, the clock usually stops pretty promptly when the action stops, so a 20 minute half has been known to go over half an hour, but I think Rugby Union would score best – the telecasts really capture the free flowing nature of the game.
I don’t have so much free time that I want to do this analysis frame by frame, but it occurs to me that some kind of time tracking app could be used, eg you punch in and out of play and replay and ads as tasks. More news if I ever get around to doing it :)
What do you get if you erase Garfield and his comments from a Garfield comic?
Sartre would approve. More Garfield Minus Garfield
In the news this week, a bank in Nashville was held up by a man dressed as Santa. Witnesses noted that the man was ‘jovial’ and stayed in character throughout the robbery. Maybe Santa himself is doing things tough this year, and as the robber said, he needed the money “to pay his elves”.
Elves got to get paid, son
This led to some discussion at our house. I thought it was funny as hell, the lady interviewed in the news report didn’t seem traumatised or upset, she was kind of amused that the guy had kept up the character the whole time. If he had just worn the suit and acted like a bank robber, different story, but to make the effort to act Santa the whole time almost makes it seem like the money was secondary to the awesome braintweak, like an Improv Everywhere mission, but with a gun.
On the other side of the discussion, Santa represents a lot to people, especially children. Even knowing that this is clearly not the real Santa, I guess it’s kinda upsetting for kids, and little ones could find this a mite scary. Also, you know, on principle it’s a misappropriation of the person of Santa for selfish ends, an armed robbery is a serious and dangerous thing and not associated with a giver of gifts and bringer of Christmas joy.
I can see both these points of view, but I can’t get too upset at the situation – to be honest, for most of the last hundred years Santa has been used and abused by marketers and advertisers who want to separate us from our money, so it seems only fair for him to cut out the middle man and get a bit of that action himself!
Last in the exercise series, here are a couple of links to some sample workout programmes, including descriptions of how to do it ‘right’.
Art of Manliness has the Bodyweight Workout for Busy Men. As well as more on the effectiveness of this type of training, it has a sample routine with a good variety of exercises to get you started. AoM also has a feature on 35+ different kinds of push ups, with videos, which allow you to exercise different areas more than others, or just make them a whole lot harder!
Simplefit.org suggests a simpler routine, but adds a logbook, and also a busy community forum to compare tips and experiences, and keep you motivated.
Bodyweight Culture also has a forum and plenty of articles and features. There’s loads more to find on the web, so keep looking for different stuff you like and build your own.
Don’t forget the importance of warming up. This is probably my biggest failing as I’m impatient and short on time, but it does make a difference as far as improving your workout, preventing strain and also recovering quickly. It’s hard to find a good warm up routine that will fit in the short time frame I have. From what I’ve read, you mainly want to get the blood flowing before you start, so a little cardio with light full body movements are good, such as star jumps, high kicks and rowing, eg sit on the floor and reach for your toes and back, but don’t over stretch. Stretches are important warming up for sport but less so before a bodyweight workout, but they make for a good warm down afterwards and help your overall flexibility.
Lastly, while one of the advantages of the bodyweight workout is that you don’t have to blow wads of cash on equipment, the chin up or pull up is one of the best single exercises you can do, so you’ll need somewhere to hang fromand chances are you’ll need to make or buy something. If you have exposed beams somewhere like a basement or patio, here’s a home-made bar that will hang over an I-beam. Instructables has a plan for a doorway mounted pull up bar with no screws or holes, instead there’s a significant amount of engineering involved to get it right. Or if you’re willing (and permitted) to screw into ceiling or walls, go for it!
That’s the end of the series on bodyweight workouts. If you are thinking of starting a humble exercise programme, let me know!
Some time last Thursday night, our internet dropped out. Happens occasionally when it rains a lot, most likely due to water in the cabling pits seeping into the joins and increasing line attenuation. Or some science thing. Anyway it wasn’t that this time, cos middle of Friday it was still out, so we logged a fault with the ISP (Exetel). Saturday morning got an SMS saying try the usual stuff – isolate the line, which since it’s a naked DSL line it already is, reset modem, try a short phone cable etc – and contact support again if fault continues. Contacted them and they logged fault with wholesaler – read: Telstra – on Saturday, and Telstra ‘rushed’ a tech out to fix the problem on the following Wednesday, so we were without internet for 6 days total. Handy tip for Exetel customers – you know you are on an ISP that keeps prices down by reducing support service, so you accept that, but if you have a genuine fault rather than just needing helpdesk, it’s worth getting on their site at work or something and mentioning it on the Exetel forums, that tends to get the attention of a tech who’ll follow it up informally for you. May not be much quicker but it feels like someone’s helping.
Another note – we had a fault that required an onsite tech once before, when we had Internode as our ISP. So while both times the fault was outside the control of the ISP, Internode rode Telstra a lot harder and had a Telstra tech out here within a couple of days. You get what you pay for, we choose to pay 20 bucks less a month cos most faults I can fix myself, and besides, it’s just the internet, we can live without it for a few days.
Except a week without it shows you that the internet has become more than just leisure and convenience, and how much it’s become a central part of managing your life. Leisure is no big problem, there’s TV and stuff and even without electricity we are blessed enough to have a family that enjoys playing games and spending time together. The convenience things are a little annoying – you get used to unfettered access to the Bureau of Meteorology when planning your weekend, and having to wait more than a minute to access information like IMDB is like, so 1990. We use the internet for recipes, how to fix stuff, the kind of general information that you take for granted that you can have instantly.
Worst part though was discovering that the internet is becoming practically necessary for modern life. There’s all sorts of organisational info in my email, plus scouts and church and family all use email to coordinate stuff. We use the banks’ websites to keep an eye on the credit card, make payments for bills, school stuff and so on. And add on top of that, we don’t have a phone service, just VOIP, so no internet = no phone. Sure there’s mobiles, but there are still plenty of people who for some reason don’t ring your mobile. So it was quite an isolating feeling, by the time I got to work on Monday I was jonesing for data, but it was still quite an inconvenience to organise our family affairs that way.
I do know of a couple of people who have no internet at all, at home or work. While it seems crippling to me, obviously it is in fact possible to get by without any internet access at all. But like anything significantly convenient and useful, once you have it it’s hard to go backwards.
Footnote: At one point where for the seventeenth time in the day I’d gone ‘I dunno, I’ll go and look…no I won’t…’ I threw my hands in the air in frustration and said ‘Argh, it’s like I’m missing a piece of my brain’. Connor didn’t miss the opportunity to score one – ‘Dad you’re always at us for acting like we’re addicted to technology, and now your saying a whole part of your body is missing’. Touche.
Shame on me for not reading the entire set of youtube uploading instructions – I didn’t realise until quite Sunday night that the audio was severely out of sync on the Youtube version. So I’ve fixed that and reuploaded, and now you can enjoy Connor and my stop motion animation movie, The Brass Monkey, with the sound effects and dialogue in synch with the action on screen!
Just letting you know I’ve finished the animation project, woo! Connor and I did the dialogue last week, worked on FX, soundtrack and final editing today. Will upload real soon now
I blogged a couple of weeks ago about my experience working out over the last couple of years, and some of the advantages mentally and physically, and promised to talk a bit more about bodyweight workouts – doing exercises that don’t require any special equipment or location.
There are a few big advantages to a bodyweight workout over going to the gym or other formal programme. The biggest one for me was that it is very easy to get started this way – while it’s exciting to go to the gym, pay your membership, have someone develop a custom programme and feel that you are starting out on something big, it’s also a big step with a fair amount of attendant cost and time, and potential to fail – when your motivation to go to the gym is waning, or you have a few busy weeks where it’s difficult to find the time and energy to get down there for an hour or so several times a week, you can start to feel guilty about all the time and money you’ve put into it going to waste, but guilt can just make you even less motivated, and before you know it you’ve unconsciously given up on it.
Same applies for home gym equipment. Google for ‘Things you should never buy new’ and you’ll see most articles list sports+gym equipment, as there is so much out there from people who’ve bought up and then lost the motivation, available second hand in barely used condition. With a bodyweight workout, you don’t need much more than your own body, which to be fair is also used and the condition may vary, but it’s cheap and unlike other equipment will actually improve in condition the more you use it! The few accessories you may need can usually be found around the house, so there’s no cost.
Timewise it’s also easier – rather than 45 minutes of cardio, 45 minutes of circuit or weight work, add ten minutes each way for transit and ten minutes to shower and change at the end for a gym workout, I get up in the morning, stretch for five to get the blood flowing and then spend around 20-30 minutes exercising as part of my morning routine. Starting out, it’s even shorter – when I started I could only manage about four push-ups so that didn’t take long at all….
Part of the trick of starting regular exercise is the starting – and there’s another advantage here. You don’t need any clothes, you don’t need to be embarrassed about it, you don’t need to save up or wait for a friend to come with you or any of those other things that make it hard to get the momentum going. You can just get up one morning and say, hmm I might do some sit-ups. Put on some music that motivates you, move some furniture around and get to it. It’s as easy as you like, so rather than having to start with a full Marine-fitness routine you just do what you can and then increase it day by day.
Try to do it every day, or at least every work day as part of your morning routine. You can extend your programme to the point where you are comfortable and feeling good, or you can keep building your counts and making the exercises harder until you have the body of Patrick Swayze in Roadhouse, may he rest in peace.
The actual exercises I use, and some more suggested ones, will come in a future article and you’ll notice there’s no real cardio in there. No prob, if you want cardio don’t buy a treadmill, buy an ipod and go jogging. If you live in a dangerous area, so much the better, you’ll run faster and get fit more quickly :) However keep in mind that the link between exercise and weightloss is questionable, particularly in terms of cardio. It’s good for your heart of course, that’s why it’s called cardio, so if you enjoy it go for it. I’m working on utilising the link between building muscle and losing fat – in short, more muscle improves the shape of your body, and increases your resting metabolism, so you look and feel better and burn some of the fat off. A big advantage of muscle building over cardio, is that you don’t end up so ravenous, so you’re less likely to offset your exercise by eating more.
Just wanted to give you a quick update on the stop motion movie I’d been working on. It’s a bit stalled, but most of the actual filming is done. There’s only been one major technical issue so far (other than, you know, the quality of the lighting, models, animation… :P ) which was after spending an hour and a half on a particularly intricate and tiring shot the stop motion software somehow neglected to save it. Not PEBCAK, by the way, because for starters I was standing at the time, and also because I have had it happen before – I think the glitch actually happens at the start of the capture and it doesn’t create the file properly, so when you close the capture you end up with a zero byte file that has never had any frames put into it.
The reason for the stall in production is less a motivation thing and more a practical one – I broke one of the legs on our dinner table and haven’t been organised enough to get it fixed, so the table I’d been using as my animation studio is currently doing duty in the dining room… So there’ll be no progress until I get around to finding a carpenter or other wood expert to produce a properly lathed and routed and stained table leg that matches the one I broke (or I do some MacGyver business with a broom handle, a magnet, a paper clip and a tin camp bowl) so that I can have my other table back!
More news as it comes to hand.
