David Ernst chats with the World

Wednesday, 2006-05-24

This time, work interrupts the bike ride

Filed under: cycling, what I did today, geek — David @ 12:35 am

Even after Saturday’s trip to King’s Island with Priscilla, I woke up on Sunday feeling well rested and motivated to go for a bike ride. It seems like something one shouldn’t fight when it happens, so I started looking at my maps. I didn’t want to go back to the route that I’d failed on last time, I wanted something new. I’d been wondering recently if I’m just used to all of the reasonable ways to exit Bloomington on a bike. Then I remembered that the collection of trips that I bought from the Bloomington Bicycle Club includes a sheet called “The ins and outs of Bloomington”. So, I studied that. The answer is yes, I am pretty used to all of them, but it’s nice to have a list before you so that you can remember ones you haven’t done in a while and think about where they might go that’s different than places you’ve been before. And so it was that I decided to head north on the West side of Highway 37 (which is sort of the great divide of biking around Bloomington). It looked like I might be able to make it to the White River if I was feeling good, and that sounded like a fun adventure.

Read on for more of the adventure, and more unbelievably cool stuff one can do with GPS data in this day and age.

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Sunday, 2006-05-21

Net Neutrality is a deep issue

Filed under: Uncategorized — David @ 11:12 pm

Do you remember when I said “Everyone is right about Alito“? Well, everyone is wrong about Net Neutrality. Or, put more fairly, everyone is right about some of the things that they say, and wrong about other things that they say. Very little of the hailstorm of opinion circulating on the subject is free of spin, overstatement or falsehood. Almost all of the opinion is representing either a vested interest or an ideological interest. I work for a small ISP, which perhaps puts me in an interesting position: I understand (imho) pretty well what’s going on, but the degree to which my interest in the matter is vested is pretty minor. Furthermore, the question of the government’s role here is deep. So, I offer my reading of the situation, in hopes that it will help some folks to develop an opinion.

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Monday, 2006-05-15

Tour Review: The Kinsey Institute

Filed under: reviews, what I did today, journalism — David @ 9:49 am

The 2004 movie Kinsey brought an understandable renewed interest in the work of Alfred Kinsey. But anyone who lives in Bloomington for a while knows the basics about him: That he usually sported a bowtie; that he became famous as a sex researcher (in many ways the first sex researcher); that he did his work on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University; and that the institute for for sex research that he founded and which now bears his name lives on to this day — a tribute to his determination and that of then IU President Herman Wells. Oh, and that the Institute houses one of the largest collections of “pornography” in the world (more on that below).

I was vaguely aware of the IU/sex research relationship when I moved to Bloomington in 1992, but by the following year I was very well aware of the basic details described above. However, here in 2006 I had never been to the Institute, nor did I even know where it was located, even though I am amicably acquainted with its Director and her husband (it’s certainly an exaggeration to say that everyone in Bloomington knows everyone else… but it’s not a ridiculous exaggeration).

Well, leave it to the highly motivated and highly effective founder of the new polyamory group in Bloomington to blaze me a path to the Institute’s door after fourteen years. Much to the delight of me and many of my fellow members, she just called them up and asked if we could take a tour. Sure! And, so it was that some of the mystery of The Kinsey Institute was unveiled.

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Sunday, 2006-05-07

Could there be a seasonal weight thing in humans?

Filed under: geek, journalism, philosophizing — David @ 10:56 am

I was a chubby kid, but ever since puberty, I’ve been fortunate that the mix of recreational interests that I’ve had have apparently been enough exercise to keep my weight under control, even for as much as I like to eat (and you can read that “as much…” clause in two different ways, both of which are true). I’ve never engaged in exercise specifically for my health, although I’m certainly glad that there are activities that I enjoy doing (dancing, biking, frisbee…) that count as exercise even if I’m doing them for fun. So, I don’t think about my weight that much. I’m lucky.

Having said all of that, I do realize that not being focused on something is a good recipe for letting it get out of one’s control, and memories of having problems with my weight as a child keep me worried that I could have trouble in the future. Fortunately for me, my own father has a theory about healthy weight-management with which I’ve really jumped on board: “I don’t care how much you weigh, but you should weigh that amount every year.” Suppose you gain two pounds per year. That works out to less than three ounces per month, basically imperceptable. But, if you did that for 25 years, you’d weigh 50 pounds more than you do now. I will not feel at all good about my weight in 25 years if I weight 50 pound more than I do now.

So, the theory says, you’ve got to have a baseline that you keep coming back to. You’ve got to make sure that you don’t fall into this imperceptable creep. Once a year you’ve got to weigh the baseline amount. You pick the date. You pick the weight. But, if you’re not there, do something to get there, every year.

Ok. Now, again, I’m not worried about weighing too much now, so I decided a couple of years ago to set my baseline weight a few pounds more than I weighed at that moment. (Out of respect for the idea that one’s weight is a private matter, I shall not give any absolutely numbers in this public forum. Suffice it to say that the baseline was an amount I’d be perfectly comfortable weighing for the rest of my life). So, I signed up for the plan, and started weight myself more often, which turned out to be about once every three months.

What I found was that my weight varied more than I would have expected it to. The first winter after I started paying attention, I was actually a few pounds over my baseline, which surprised me. I thought “I might actually have to go on a diet”. I decided that I’d set my date for the summer, when it’d be easy to convince myself to increase my exercise level, and lots of fresh vegetables are in season.

What I found, though, was that in the Spring, without even trying, I had dropped back down in weight to a few pounds under my baseline. And, I stayed at about that rate until the next winter, when it went up again.

I don’t know how long this has been going on, but this year I felt motivated to pay some attention to it. Somewhere around the beginning of 2006, I found myself weighing about five pound over my baseline. That caused me some concern. I decided I’d reduce my intake of pop (man, what a fast way to ingest calories pop is!) and have been doing that for months. I don’t know how many, but enough that’d I’d weighed myself a couple of times since then (and I’d say never twice within three weeks), and didn’t notice any real change.

Then suddenly, this past week I weighed myself and I was about three pounds under my baseline. So, something like 6-8 pounds lost, with practically no variation in diet or exercise habits. What gives? And the pattern seems pretty clearly defined: every Winter I put on weight, every Spring it comes back off.

So, I can’t help but ask the question: could there be a seasonal thing going on in humans with their weight?

I did a cursory web search, but this is a hard subject to study on the web. The problem, of course, is that it’s hard to get past the countless self-help weight-loss guides and stuff. Basically, I found a lot of articles about the food served at Xmas parties, but practically nothing about biology.

It’s certainly possible that the holidays have something to do with my weight fluctuation. But, it just doesn’t seem that likely. Yes, my family feasts over the holidays, but that’s only a couple of meals, and I certainly do a fair amount of feasting in my normal existence. Yes, I attend holiday parties, but I attend parties all the time, and there’s always fat-filled finger food and alcohol there, and I don’t feel that I indulge any differently in November and December than I do normally. I could be wrong. Maybe I do and don’t realize it.

But, here’s the opposing case. I’m a relatively good sample set for this experiement. I weigh myself on the same scale, and do my best to keep it well zeroed (it is a pretty crappy scale, so that’s one weakness of my research methods). I eat two meals a day with limited snacking. For lunch, I typically eat at one of the many restaurants near where I work, and this is true throughout the year, and they certainly don’t vary their portion sizes in accord with the season. Dinners are more often than not food that I prepared, and I like eating until I feel a sensation of being “full”. Some things change about the kinds of foods that I eat in the Winter vs. the Spring, but I don’t know how much they’d matter. The most obvious thing is that in the Winter I make more soup, which I don’t consider to be at all bad for me. Throughout the year, but especially when vegetables are good, I make a lot of “stir fries” (interpretting that broadly), and while many people think that vegetable oil is not really bad for you, there’s no question that there’s more fat in my home-fried food than there is in soup, right?

As for activity, well, I haven’t been particularly active recently. As I just wrote in a previous post, I biked more in January and February than I did in March and April. I did some serious binge-dancing at the Pigtown Fling in late March, but come on… And besides, I danced just as hard at Winter Warmup in December, and in general my dance habits haven’t changed much.

So, what I’m suggesting (totally without proof) is that there’s something else going on inside me. I’m not suggesting anything supernatural. But, I think scientists tend to model our bodies as machines more than as animals, and I think this evidences itself in attitudes about nutrition and exercise. I do believe that one will lose weight if one burns more calories than one ingests, but it’s hard to know how many calories one is burning. And, in general, I think many people maintain a stable weight even while ingesting more than they burn. One simple possibility would be that we don’t actually digest all that we ingest. Our GI tract could just let some calories pass through us through its involuntary work. And, if it did that, it doesn’t seem at all unresonable to me that it might vary the amount based on the season. Many if not most living things native to non-equatorial regions have some instinctual sense of the season. Why could this not be true of humans? It doesn’t have to be the GI tract thing, that’s just a random speculation. But, my body does all kinds of things in digesting foods, and I don’t understand them, and there would seem to be countless ways that my cells could do different things with the nutrition I present then that would cause fluctuations in my weight.

I don’t know if this is true or not. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. For all I know, it may even be accepted fact among scientists, and I just can’t find their work. I doubt it, though. But, I invite everyone to offer evidence and theory of any kind in support of or opposition to this proto-theory.

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Unsuccessful bike ride

Filed under: cycling, what I did today — David @ 9:28 am

It’s spring! You’d think I’d be doing lots of weekend bike trips! Well, April saw a lot of special events on the weekends, so I didn’t really have time. Last weekend would have been a possibility, but it seemed like it was just about to rain the entire weekend, and besides, I was hosting that after dance party, so I had to get ready for that. So, ironically, my bike computer tells me that I biked substantially more in both January and February than in either March or April. Weird, huh? Two contributing factors: I’d rather bike in cold than in rain, and in each of Jan and Feb there was at least one nice weekend one which I biked (I even wrote about the January ride).

Well, yesterday (Saturday) the weather was very nice, and I had very little planned, so… the beginning of the Summer riding season! Yahoo!

Well, not quite. I got out my gear, cleared the data on the GPS, and got on the bike. I needed air in my tires, which I prefer to get from gas stations because I don’t like my own pump. So I started out towards the gas station on 2nd street a mile or so west of my house. I knew they used to have free air, but they’ve changed brands since then, so I wasn’t sure (it’s now a Sunoco).

Well, I got there, and saw the air hose right where it used to be. But when I went to use it… there was no tip on the end to connect to my Schrader Valves (a term that I’d heard on Car Talk just a few hours previous so it was already swimming around in my mind). Shoot.

I took a roundabout route to the next gas station on 2nd St., a Citgo near the Sportsplex. I rode all around before I finally found the air hose hear the carwash. It was free too! And it worked! Man, having enough air in the tires makes a huge difference…

So, I was off! I biked down Clear Creek Trail, all the way to the end. Trying to work my way west of highway 37, I got onto a road called Church Lane. I realized that I’d been there before (it’s getting harder for me to find good bike routes outside of town that I haven’t been on). There was a decent hill on it, and I think I remember hearing a popping sound of some sort as I was fumbling with my gears. But, whatever the case, only a few difficult strokes into the climb, I knew something was wrong. I was in a much higher gear than my shifters indicated.

Sure enough, the cable that controls my rear derailleur was no longer attached to my gear shifter. Ugh. I didn’t know if it could be fixed or not, but a small investigations suggested that there was at least enough (or not obviously insuffucient) cable to attach. I set myself down right in front of a house there (there were no sidewalks or anything on this road) and investigated.

I am happy to say that with the possible exception of a wire cutter, my unbelievably cool bike tool did have every tool I wished for during the investigation. I used three or four different allen wrenches to loosen up a variety of things and investigate. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure it out. Members of the family that lived in the home I was in front of walked by a couple of times, and I felt a little bad for installing myself right there. There weren’t a whole lot of options, though…

Anyway, I eventually gave up and just rode back in perma-high-gear on the rear derailleur. Once I was moving it was fine, but starting was definitely more annoying, and climbing hills was a real chore. sigh I did ride into town to Bikesmiths, but they told me that I’d need a new cable and they couldn’t fit me in in the last 1.5 hours of the day. shrug Ok. So, Monday…

And, when I got home, I figured I’d at least make sure I remembered how to get data out of my GPS, and after a little investigation I realized I hadn’t turned “tracking” on, so I had no data to retrieve!!

So, the first day of the summer biking season was kind of a bust. I still biked about 13 miles, actually, so I got a bit of exercise, but I had thought I’d bike about twice that… and I thought I’d have more fun…

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Thursday, 2006-05-04

Suddenly, I’m playing the guitar

Filed under: music & dance, what I did today — David @ 4:51 pm

Saturday night, I called the 5th Saturday dance here in Bloomington.

Tuesday night, I called the dance in Indianapolis.

Wednesday night, I thought I’d get to actually dance. And, technically, I did, but only one dance.

The first Wednesday of the month is always open mic night at the Bloomington contradance, and we frequently don’t have very many callers. But we usually have plenty of musicians. As I exited my car (being unusually punctual for the dance) I thought “maybe I should have brought my banjo… Oh, there’ve been plenty of musicians at open mic nights lately, and besides, you want to dance.”

Foreshadowing…

I saw a caller signup sheet when I showed up, and it said that Patsy was going to call (which, I correctly guessed, was her first time calling at open mic. Great!). Bill and Bob were both signed up too, leaving only one open slot. “Cool! I might be able to dance the whole time”..

Yeah….

I did dance the first dance with Cisa. Patsy did a great job calling. The music was great… But it was pretty much only John playing his fiddle. I felt for him. Plus there were too many male dancers. Plus there was a beautiful guitar (a Silvertone f-hole, kind of like this), sitting on the stage. Instead of dancing the second dance, I went up on stage and asked John if he knew whose guitar that was. “Yours!” he said. It was his actually, but he brought it in case he found himself playing fiddle alone and there just happened to be someone who knew how to play the guitar but who didn’t bring one to the dance.

Oh, I guess that would be me!

So, for the 2nd-8th dances of the evening, I played guitar. Wow. So, I used to play the guitar a lot in high school, and I still “get it”. But, I’m out of shape and tend to find my hands getting tired when I play the guitar vs. the banjo these days… plus, I never have really played old-time guitar. I’ve often marvelled at how those old time guitarists can keep up that “boom-chang” so steadily and for so long.

I’m still marvelling…

Yeah, wow, I felt very exposed, and very underprepared for playing the guitar for a contra dance. A thought I had was “[compared with other instruments] it’s easy to know what to do, but it’s very difficult to do it… or at least to do it well”. I’m hoping that I helped to round out the sound of the band, but from where I sat, I was not at all certain that I was.

I actually felt like I got better at it as the evening wore on. I joked to John afterwards that it was a bit like an intensive work session on old time guitar. I just had to keep playing. After a while I noticed that the middle finger of my left hand was tingling. I said “I think I’m doing nerve damage to my finger…. Oh wait, it’s just a blister.” It was just a blister. Then a song or two later, the blister popped, which I realized because there was only one possible source for the droplets of clear liquid that had suddenly appeared on my fingers. It’s remarkable how much more pressure is applied to ones fingers on the guitar vs. the banjo.

But, actually, it didn’t hurt much. And, really, it was my right (strumming) hand where I felt like I was really getting the lesson. The chords I was playing were all simple standard stuff, and although I made plenty of mistakes, fingering the chords for old time music is not that hard. But, keeping your right hand going with the “boom-changs”, being creative with the “Booms” and still getting a clear ring on the “changs”… it ain’t easy. My hat’s off to all of you old time guitarists that make us melody instruments sound so good.

In any event, no one asked me to leave, so I at least played that well. And had a good time at Max’s place afterwards. So, good…

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