They didn’t.  Or at least, I don’t think they did.  I don’t really know.  But I did go ahead and create an account. There?  Happy?

So far, it’s overwhelming… which I guess it to expected.  Within an hour of signing up, my inbox had basically only facebook notifications visible in it.  Two full screens of messages, about 35 facebook notifications, and two normal legitimate emails.  Most of these are friend confirmations, so presumably those will die down soon once the initial rush is over.  Let’s hope…

Meanwhile, I find the facebook interface easy enough to use (very impressive how quickly it identified all of these “friends” for me) but… overwhelming.  Right now it feels like 30 of my friends are having a party in the room while I’m trying to work.  Not that I can’t see the attraction, but, at the risk of seeming a 21st century high-tech grumpy old man, I’m closing the window for now.

My family latched on to these battery testers a few years ago, clever little things that gauge the size of your battery and use that to figure out how much power to expect from them, so that they can compare that to how much power they are putting out, thus giving you a reading on how much “juice” is left in them.  Lots of batteries seem to have the same kind of thing built into them these days.  Whatever.

I’ve been noticing something recently: lots of products use multiple batteries (2, 4, whatever).  When the device starts to complain about its batteries being low, I take them out and test them.  Often – usually, I’d say – I find that only one of them is actually low.  Take out four batteries, three of them test perfectly fine, and the fourth is totally dead.  I have to suspect that this isn’t just because the one battery is failing, I think it’s something to do with the physics of batteries.  But, I don’t know what.  And, I could just be wrong.  But, anyone else experience this?

Whatever the case, you might think about checking all of your batteries instead of just throwing them all away when the device they are in says they are low.  Curious to hear if others experience this as well.

Years ago I wrote an email to Kroger suggesting that they make the information that they make collection with their Kroger Plus Card (you know the type) available to the customer in question. I would love to see a history of my shopping. I would love to run queries such as “how much of my food budget am I spending on produce” (or, dare I question it, beer and wine?). They never replied. And they certainly aren’t offering this service. I think it’s a shame. I’m sure they are thinking “we don’t want to give consumers that kind of power, they might change their buying habits. Perhaps. But I suspect most people would never use it. And some of us would probably lean towards buying things at Kroger so that they could include it in their data analysis. So, I present it now publicly as a challenge to all you big SuperMarket companies… the programming should be trivial, simple queries of your huge database. Some of us would really love it. Thanks.

Meanwhile, thanks Vectren.

And then I thought “y’know, I don’t think I need more than the ~7 Mega Pixels I’m getting now.”

These “who would ever need more computer power?” comments are collected and laughed at by techies everywhere. Probably the best known is a comment falsely attributed to Bill Gates that 640K should be
“enough for anybody”. Anyone who knows what RAM is should realize how wrong this idea is, how much we now want more RAM, in fact NEED it if we want to run any software written in the past 10-15 years. So Gates gets laughed at, even though this time he appears not to deserve it.

So why would I go “on the record” here in my blog and say that I doubt that I’ll ever want for a camera with 16.2 Mega Pixels? The difference is clear: in this case, the limiting factor is not the imagination of computer programmers and software designers. In this case, the limit is my eyes.

Consider this: around 1990, us nerds talked a fair amount about printing resolution. I think I was pretty excited at the first 300 DPI (that’s “dots per inch”) printer. Then came the 600 DPI Lasers, and they looked great. Now 15 years later, we are typically using 100 times as much RAM in our computers, but our printers are still typically 300-600 DPI. Why no better? Did the engineers lose the ability to go further? Not in my opinion. My opinon is: most of us, especially those of us who aren’t trained as printing professionals, can’t see the benefit of higher resolution. Maybe not the pros either. In any event, us lay people certainly aren’t going to pay more for more resolution, because we basically can’t tell the difference. Actually, a casual observer looking casually at a printout likely won’t notice the difference between 300 and 600 DPI, they both look pretty good.

My assertions about digital camera resolution staying pretty stagnant from here on out is similar. My 7 megapixel images don’t fit (at full resolution) on any of the monitors I own. Sure, it’s nice to be able to zoom in, but.. I’m buying a camera, not a telescope. So, mostly that high resolution is good for good looking printouts. But these images from my camera will fit (at full resolution) onto 8.5×11 paper at 300 DPI (they will actually be 8.25 x 11). And I hardly ever actually do that. They can do just under 4×6 at 600 DPI. I don’t do that much either. For standard 4×6 at 300 DPI prints, I don’t even use the full resolution that I have right now. So I don’t have much incentive to buy more.

Some people do, of course. A full 8.5 x 11 printout (with no border) at 600 DPI would be something like 30-40 Megapixels, and I can see that people like professional photographers will want that. Maybe lay people will too, but they won’t pay much extra for it once they have 300 DPI at the same size, which many of us already do. Now, if plotters became cheap and commonplace, maybe we’d all be making poster-sized printouts of our families and stuff, and then there’d be at least SOME incentive for cameras with much greater resolution. But, until something like that happens, I think camera manufacturers are going to have a hard time selling us common folk on much more than 7 Megapixels. (By the way, if you want to play with these numbers, there’s a nice image resolution calulator you can play with).

Besides the human factor, there are technology-related reasons that average people won’t want much more resolution right now. With the current state of computers and networks, it’s pretty clunky to deal with these full resolution pictures. I took about 400MB of photos celebrating Xmas with my family. That’s 1% of the total disk space on my laptop. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but if I did that once a week for a year (not really that many photos) my laptop’s Hard Drive would be 50% with photos. These things will change, though. It’s the maximum resolution that we can distinguish with our eyes that won’t.

This isn’t limited to image resolution, either. Audio quality as defined by the Compact Disc (16 bit/44100 hz) is still as good as we (basically) ever go for, and that was defined over 25 years ago. It would be trivial to go at higher quality today, but no one typically does because humans can’t hear the difference when you do. Our ears aren’t sensitive enough. Similarly, Hollywood has used the same rate of 24 frames per second for something like 100 years. You occassionally see some distortion because of this (think a moving wagon wheel on the big screen) but there’s not much of a push to make it better. Again, human perception isn’t good enough to justify the expenditure.

All this is basically to serve as a reminder that techological advances are not always limited by technical issues, sometimes it’s our physiology that limits things. I’ve hinted previously that once we have enough network bandwidth to do high-quality video and audio in real time, there won’t be much incentive to go faster. I’m not ready to stick my neck out on that yet, but I will say that I don’t see much demand for anything that would require more bandwidth than that. Still, that’s quite a ways away…

Anyway, she started counting the continents she’d been on, and I was surprised to hear her list “America” as one. I’m mildly ashamed to admit now that I mocked her about this at the time, laughing at the idea that she might consider North and South America to be the same continent. I felt very proud of my recollection since childhood that there are seven continents: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica.

It didn’t take long in our conversation, though, before I realized that I – uh – didn’t have much ground to stand upon. Sue, Beth, and other geology-educated people with whom I’d discussed things like this talk a lot about “plates” and stuff, but I’m not sure how much geologists even believe in continents anymore. And, certainly, I’ve pretty much given up thinking that there’s any geological reason to consider Europe and Asia separate continents. And, as these thoughts were going through my head, Pri was telling me that in Brazil they are taught that North and South America are the same continent. Hmmm…

Well, she later sent me two links to Wikipedia pages, one in Portuguese and one in English. Sure enough, it seems that there is not global consensus on this matter. The English page offers a list of different models of the number of continents that are taught world-wide. It claims that the “geographic community” prefers the six continent model that considers Eurasia to be one continent.

I don’t really have any knowledge that would make me feel comfortable even having an opinion on this subject. (Actually, I do take issue with the Portuguese page’s inclusion of “Artico” as a continent. I don’t think there’s any land there, and whatever we call a continent, I think it should involve land.) However, it does highlight two deeply held beliefs of mine:

1. What’s real is the world, when we describe it we are just trying to model it with words and concepts.
2. No matter how simply something was taught to us, it might not true. There might not even be any consensus on the matter. Or, the expert consensus might be contrary to what we learned.

So, don’t be quick to make fun of someone who learned something different than you did. And… question everything.

(Kynthia told me that she once gave an impromptu speech with “question everything” as the subject. Maybe even the title. In any event, it might be one of the extremely rare phrases that would fit on a bumper sticker that I’d be willing to wear on my car.)

Read on for more of the adventure, and more [unbelievably cool stuff one can do with GPS data in this day and age](http://www.bloomington.in.us/~drernst/gmaps/20060521-maple-bottom.html).

Unfortunately, while I was packing things up, I got a phone call from a co-worker informing me that the problem that we had been working on was not in fact resolved. I’m not going to go into the details, but I had to open a trouble ticket with AT&T, which was definitely not what I was in the mood to do while I was getting ready for an aerobic adventure on a beautiful Spring day. Ugh. Well, I did it, and in fact got a call back from an engineer before I had even left. He said exactly what I told the first person he’d say, which is fine because part of that is “we’ll have to open this other kind of ticket for this.” But you can’t open that second kind of ticket without the first one, even if you know that’s what the first people will say. Wait, I’m not getting in to the details…

Ok, so, after a fair amount of futzing with bike gear, I finally headed out. I left at about 11:50. Oh, the GPS tells me it was 11:48:22. OK, GPS. Anyway I gave myself the goal of being back by 3pm. I figured I’d head towards the river and see how close I got.

I like the route that I plotted (which moves clockwise as you look at the map). Low traffic, relatively direct, interesting, pretty… yeah, good. Seeing the [elevation profile](http://www.bloomington.in.us/~drernst/gmaps/maple-bottom-elev.png) in retrospect is comforting, because it’s nice to see that that hill that was giving me trouble about 8 miles into the trip was substantial (250 feet climb in about a mile, maybe less… if it’s in a mile, that’s about a 5% grade on average, nothing to sneeze at).

Well, after cruising down that hill, I crossed a bridge over Indian Creek (as I always say “the water is downhill from here”, so when you coast across a bridge, you usually know you’re not going to be coasting for much longer). I saw a sign marking a trailhead on some land owned by [the Sycamore Land Trust](http://www.bloomington.in.us/~sycamore/). This turns out to be the [Beanblossom Bottoms Nature Preserve](http://www.bloomington.in.us/~sycamore/bbbnp.html) (BBBNP), but I didn’t know that at the time. Part of it is a National Wildlife Refuge, which was pretty clearly a small wetland area and almost certainly the wildlife they are offering refuge to are migratory birds. Anyway, didn’t even know that was there. Cool!

I thought maybe I’d investigate, but instead I realized that I had missed a call on my cell phone. I had a cell phone signal, so I checked my voicemail, and it was the phone company. As so often happens, part of my description was lost in the transfer process from person to person, so… Wait, I’m not going into the details. Suffice to say that I spent at least a half hour on the phone with them discussing what might be going on. I cannot deny getting a kick out of discussing things like the nitty-gritty functionality of high-end telecommunications equipment and services while standing on the edge of a nature preserve with nothing but my feet or my bicycle to take me anywhere and nobody else around except for the very occassional car that drives by (leaving a cloud of dust behind them from the gravel road). But, having said that, this is *not* what I wanted to be doing right then.

After all the time on the phone, we basically had two possibilities of what was causing the problem: one would be our problem to fix, the other the phone company’s problem. This may be surprising, but I actually prefer it when it’s our problem, because it’s usually actually easier to fix something than to navigate the bureaucratic maze of phone numbers and the people who answer them to find someone who can fix their problem. But, I’m getting dangerously close to getting into the details of it. What I had before me was 10+ miles to bike to get to our machine room and see if the latest hypothesis might be correct.

And, so it was, that I made the difficult decision that I would not bike all the way to the White River that day. Looking at the maps, I think I was within 5-6 miles of it, which seems pretty close, but going there could have turned this into a 40 mile ride instead of 27. And besides, now I had work to do. So, I took the first road back towards Bloomington.

Cindy told me years ago that Bottom Road was so named because it followed Indian Creek in the bottom of the valley that it flows through. In other words, it’s the lowest road around in elevation terms. That’s not obvious when you’re on it, but looking again at that elevation profile, I realize that I had about 7 miles of relatively flat riding. No wonder it went by so quickly. The topo map confirms that this was easy riding.

Eventually, though, I had to climb up the hill to be at Upper Cascades’ elevation. This climb was hard, I was low on energy. I decided that even though I was almost back in Bloomington, I’d stop in Cascades Park and eat some of the Girl Scout Cookies that I’d packed. That was a good idea, but I should have eaten them long before that. I really have to remember to eat before I feel like I need it when I’m on long bike rides. Anyway, I felt only a little funny sitting tired and sweaty on the grass and savoring my little bag of cookies while around me large families were gathered together feasting on sausages and beer. It was hard to remember that I was in the middle of a rugged outdoor experience.

I made the possibly foolish decision to take Dunn Street into town. It’s just a route I don’t usually go, so I thought it’d be a nice change of pace. Indeed it was. But, woah, the first 100 feet of the climb next to the dam that makes Lake Griffy is *grueling*. Very steep. I mean, I’ve got to climb to get from Lower Cascades to the Library, there’s no way around that. But I suspect this was more challenging than most of the alternatives.

Anyway, I realized when I got to the library that I couldn’t leave all my gear sitting with my locked bike, because the gear wouldn’t be locked! So, I carryied it all inside with me, which wasn’t so bad. But, yeah, I felt a bit funny walking towards the machine room sweaty, exhausted, and carrying a couple bags of bike gear. The good news was that it was our problem, and knowing now what it was, I was able to get it fixed pretty quickly. I ran a few tests to confirm it, but just a few minutes later I got back on the bike and rode the very easy and familiar 0.87 of a mile home. Where I promptly took a bath and proceeded to not do very much for the rest of the day. I was much more wiped out than I should have been. I think I’m out of shape. I guess the winter will do that to you.

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.