Getting the Numbers Right

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Apple found itself on Greenpeace’s dirty list last year, receiving harsh criticism from the environmental group for its North Carolina data center. Based on Greenpeace’s estimates of the energy consumed at the facility, Apple was responsible for a lot of coal being burned. That’s not good.

While I’m really glad there are organizations like Greenpeace holding corporations to a higher standard than does our government, and I understand that Apple is a prime target for all sorts of activists because using their name generates a lot of press (Foxconn also makes Samsung toys), I really wish the activists would be a little more careful. It’s their own credibility at stake as well as Apple’s.

NOTE: I am completely aware that I come across as a shill for Apple in the following paragraphs. I went back over the text with the conscious resolve to temper the narrative, to be more balanced. The thing is, there is no balance. Greenpeace was stupid, and nobody won.

Take the data center in question. Both Greenpeace and Apple agree that Apple has built the largest solar farm in the US and the largest fuel cell generation plant in the US to provide power to the facility. Apple says those provide 60% of the power needed to run the place, and they are expanding the solar farm with the goal of reaching 100%*.

Greenpeace says the power those the solar and fuel cell plants generate is just a drop in the bucket, and the rest of the power must come from coal. Yikes. Apple says the facility will use 20MW when fully up and running, and they’ve got that covered. Greenpeace says it will use five times that much, and Apple certainly does not have it covered. That’s a big discrepancy. How do the two organizations end up so far apart?

Outsiders have used various methods to guess how much computing power is in the sprawling facility. The footprint of the building is very large; if it were filled with servers from wall to wall, power consumption would likely be much higher than what Apple claims. The thing is, the building is not filled to bursting with raw computing power, if public documents are to be believed. In fact, only about a third of the square footage is devoted to humming hardware; the rest of the building is devoted to ‘other stuff’.

So where did Greenpeace get their power estimate? According to an article I can’t find the link to anymore, the reasoning goes something like this: “Apple says they are spending a billion dollars on the facility. A typical billion-dollar data center would burn 100 MW of power, based on the performance of similar data centers. Even if Apple gold-plates the whole building, they’re not going to spend five times more for a 20MW facility than their competitors.”

OK, I can follow that logic, but you have to be careful that you don’t follow it off a cliff.

Here’s the thing: that billion dollars includes the cost of the largest solar farm and the largest fuel-cell generation facility in the United States. Greenpeace is including the cost of providing clean(er) energy to inflate their estimates of how much dirty energy the facility is consuming. If Apple simply used coal-fired electricity in their plant, they’d look better in the face of Greenpeace math.

Put another way, yes, Apple will pay five times as much for a data center as others will, if it means they don’t have to pay so much for power in the future. Apple is building a data center that is much less vulnerable to future energy cost spikes, which is a smart thing to do when you have the cash on hand now to control costs down the road.

Apple knows that electricity is its lifeblood, and there is a major initiative to make the company energy-independent. That’s just smart. They are also focussing on renewable sources for that power, which increases the up-front costs significantly, and won’t pay off for decades. From hearing the speeches, I honestly believe that doing what’s right is important among the execs at Apple. Note to investors: Apple is also becoming very good in the clean energy business. Ahead of the curve as an energy provider. I wonder, idly, if some of those dollars spent in North Carolina are to establish a beachhead in the coming energy war.

As for Greenpeace, they’ve said they’re happy about Apple’s commitment to clean(er) power, and they hope the tech giant keeps improving. We can all agree on that.

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* Time flies. Since I wrote my draft, I’ve seen a letter from a Big Shot at Apple saying the facility is now 100% renewable – though that’s a slippery term, and corporate big shots aren’t generally noted for honesty. They don’t lie so much as spin. But still.

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Something My Science Textbook Lied About

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It was fifth grade. Science period. There were two teachers responsible for the entire herd of fifth-graders, so they were not specialized in any particular field. Just give the kids a general idea of all the subjects, and the specialists will fill their heads later. Our teacher relied heavily on the veracity of the textbooks we were provided.

I remember this day well. I was sitting over on the right side of the classroom. The goal of the exercise was to understand the Scientific Method. I capitalized Scientific Method in the previous sentence because understanding it is really friggin’ important. It’s how we got here, for better or for worse.

The textbook chose Bernoulli’s Principle (these days, the press would doggedly refer to it as Bernoulli’s Theory, and imply that it might not be true even as planes passed overhead) as the Nugget of Knowledge that we, as young scientists, would ferret out through a process of forming a theory and putting it to the test experimentally or through observations of the world, then revising or scrapping the theory if the test did not yield the expected results. (The revising and scrapping parts were not included in this exercise, which is too bad, because it’s the fundamental strength of science.)

For me, as the evidence was exposed in the pages of the text, it was a puzzle to solve. A race with my fellow students to get the answer. Halfway through the lesson my hand shot up, and when recognized I gave the “right answer”. I recapitulated Bernoulli. I was a little disappointed by the teacher’s reaction. I had the right answer, but the important thing was how we got to the right answer. That’s what the scientific method is all about.

But even before the glow of my triumph was diminished by the cool reaction of the teacher, I was bothered. My gut told me that one of the key pieces of evidence cited by the textbook was, in fact, bogus. But it was a SCIENCE BOOK. It was right. It had to be.

The false evidence: You know how when you’re in the shower the dang shower curtain will assault you, pushing into the tub and wrapping around your leg? That was presented in this little science exercise as evidence of Bernoulli’s Principle. Even in fifth grade, even as I read that supposed clue to bring me to a conclusion I had long since surmised, it wasn’t working for me.

For years hence I thought of mechanisms where the rushing shower water got the air moving around it, lowering the pressure on this side of the curtain. But that would have required noticeable wind.

Yet, I continued to believe that shower curtains assaulted one because of Bernoulli’s Principle. The science book said so. I tried to make the water-coupling-with-air theory work. As I showered I tried to measure air flow. I held my hand next to the curtain on many occasions, forming explanations for why I couldn’t feel the wind. If I couldn’t come up with the explanation, that was my failure, not the theory’s. Um, principle’s.

The fact is, shower curtain assault has nothing to do with Bernoulli’s Principle. It’s convection. Finally I had to accept that my Science Book had been just plain wrong. It took many years to get there.

So here’s the true lesson about Scientific Method afforded me that day, one that took me years and years to learn: Don’t invent complicated explanations for why the other guy is right, when there’s a better answer in front of your face. Then prove the better answer. Proving the better answer is a step that a lot of our ‘science rebels’ miss. The actual science part. They deserve every bit as much disbelief as the mainstream guys do.

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Reading some Grimm

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Most mornings, I spend my first waking half-hour slogging on an exercise machine. For the first two-thirds of the workout I’m able to read, as long as the story does not require intense concentration. I’m also a cheap bastard, so I gravitate toward e-publications that are free.

Lately as I’ve slaved over the machine, I’ve been reading stories translated from the original texts of the Brothers Grimm. Honestly, they’re not that compelling. They’re like pop songs; each story has a hook and some are more successful than others. If there’s one thing the stories do well, it’s repetition. Escalating cycles. Humility and standing up to your word are paramount.

As I was pumping the exercise machine the other day, appreciating the closure of a particularly contrived parable, I asked myself, “Is this how short stories worked back then?”

In fact, that is how short stories worked back then. The whole idea of ‘short story’ as we think of it today had not been defined. And while we credit Poe and Doyle with inventing the short story, we have to give a respectful nod to Wilhelm Grimm as a progenitor of the form.

I’m smiling as I picture poor Wilhelm in a modern writers’ workshop. “So,” the perceptive critic starts, “the cat has sleeves.” The critic raises exactly one eyebrow as she pins her gaze on the writer. Wilhelm smiles sheepishly. “When you have sleeves it changes you,” he says. He’s right, but the helpful critic never buys it. The problem isn’t really the sleeves, it’s the structure.

Willy Grimm wrote stories, and they are short, but they are by no approximation short stories as we understand the form today. Mostly they are shaggy dog stories. There’s a cadence to the stories, complete with rhymes, as folks who do the right thing are rewarded, as long as they don’t get uppity afterward. But lacking is the development of an idea. Short stories today are the retroviruses of ideas. Somehow what you read injects itself into who you are.

The ideas in Bros. Grimm’s tales are pretty simple, if you can call them ideas at all. “You shouldn’t be greedy because greed is bad, m-kay?”

There are some points of interest. Many of the stories as we know them have been pretty seriously watered down from the original. The princess and the frog? Not the story I was given as a kid. The bitch makes a promise to a frog just to get her ball back, with no intention whatsoever of honoring her word. Later the frog shows up on her doorstep and her dad the king forced her to live up to her word. She resists the frog and makes a liar of herself all the way, until he turns into a handsome prince of some sort. Then she’s all over him. If I’m the prince getting my body back after all those years, I’m saying, “seeya, gold digger, you lied and whined and now suddenly you’re my friend? Methinks not.” and finding my own happy pond. Probably a reflection of the times, but women in these stories are rewards. Do right, you get yourself a hot princess. Her opinion doesn’t matter much, because obviously to get to that position where you deserve the reward you are a virtuous prince, and she’s not going to argue with that.

OK, so modern ideas of sexual roles in society can’t be used to indict Msrs. Grimm. How were they to know that women were relevant unto themselves? But still, the stories come off as clumsy. Not really stories at all, but anecdotes which sometimes have a conclusion but just as often don’t. The characters go through a series of events and at the end, they are finished with those events, and life goes on.

Which makes these fantastic tales surprisingly realistic.

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Fun With Lights

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There’s a big ho-down comin’ at work, and my boss was asked to come up with a list of pending accomplishments for her team, accompanied by pictures. So, I needed a picture of me writing, to accompany the announcement that I will soon be finishing Munchies, my long-anticipated novel. Anticipated by me, anyway.

Now, all that was required was a simple picture of me at the computer. But in my head this portrait quickly grew to include dramatic lighting that somehow gave a Munchies-like feel to the picture. That meant color gels, splashes on the walls, and dramatic light on the face, preferably from the glow of the screen.

It was also fun being the talent for once, while my sweetie gave direction from behind the camera.

In the end three of the lighting setups were moderately successful; I have picked out representatives from each of those to show below. The pictures are unaltered except for some cropping; color and exposure are straight off the camera.

For all these setups there’s a tight-beam green-gelled strobe is directly behind my head. In the first two another strobe is splashing light against the wall behind me. I’m thinking it would have been cool to make it a strong primary color, just so see how it looked, but I didn’t do that.

The second and third pictures have only the computer’s LCD screen lighting my face. This required very long shutter times to capture enough light. (The light from the strobes is a fixed quantity no matter how long the shutter is open, so you use exposure time to adjust the mix between flash and ambient light.) Quite a few almost-awesome shots were lost because I wasn’t holding still enough.

Anyway, here are some samples from the shoot. As always, you can click to biggerize them. All the shots were taken with my 85mm lens at very wide apertures to keep exposure times from getting totally ridiculous.

Two strobes and overhead halogens

Two strobes and overhead halogens

Two strobes and screen light

Two strobes and screen light

One strobe and screen light

One strobe and screen light

Not appearing in this list are shots where the green light was behind to my left, where it shone on my face a bit. An interesting effect, but it didn’t really work out this time.

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More on MPGe

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Recently I wrote an episode about the lies that surround electric vehicles. First and foremost, that they are represented as zero emission vehicles, as if the electricity they use is magically produced with no cost. I proposed they be labeled “somewhere-else emissions” vehicles.

A comment on that episode, in which I had bandied a couple of numbers about willy-nilly, got me to thinking. So, what is this MPGe number anyway? Does it really compare to the MPG ratings of gasoline-powered cars? It’s complicated, but the answer is pretty resoundingly ‘no’. That’s the easy part; the real question is, how do the numbers actually compare?

Comparing the energy stored in a gallon of gasoline to the energy stored in a battery is tricky, but with effort you can come up with a rough equivalency. The EPA uses a conversion factor of 34.02 kWh per gallon. So if a car can go 110 miles using 34 kWh of electrical energy, it’s said to have an MPGe of 110. Simple enough so far.

But that’s not the whole story. According to the American Physical Society, roughly two-thirds of energy used to produce electricity is lost to various inefficiencies. So that 110 MPGe car is really a thirty-something car. Of course with different generation methods, like photovoltaic, it gets trickier to calculate (with PV it’s more about amortizing the energy spent to produce the cell over time). But let’s just go with the rough estimate: MPGe is off by a factor of three.

To be fair, then, we have to look at the energy cost of getting gasoline to the pump. Here’s something I didn’t know: In California, every gallon of gas requires (at least) 6 kWh of electricity just to pull it from the ground. If that electricity was generated from gasoline, and at the efficiency I mention above, that would be almost half a gallon of gas spent to extract that gallon of gas. And there’s natural gas used for extraction that’s not included in that number, and depending on who you ask, may be a much higher number. Then there’s refining, which is also energy-sucking. And transporting the fuel, which as far as I can tell is just a drop in the bucket.

Much of the electricity used to extract oil from the ground comes from coal, I read from a less-than-trustworthy site. If that’s true, then what we have is a system that burns coal to give you gasoline to burn in your car.

I wish I could give you a decent citation for the above, but the sites I read pointed to California 2006 numbers that are dead links now. It’s a pretty safe bet that extraction requires more electricity than it did a few years ago, however, since the oil reserves are becoming depleted and therefore more reluctant to give up their gooey goodness.

So many numbers flying around, and so many sources with obvious political axes to grind, it’s hard to get down to the bottom of it all. And THEN, just when you think you have the numbers lining up, you have to consider this: If the Middle East had no oil, we’d not be at war there. The World Trade Center would still be standing. We pay a lot — a shitload — for our oil, that’s not reflected in the price. Our children will pay an even bigger shitload dealing with the consequences of burning that oil, and for burning the fossil fuels to generate electricity. The numbers I’m throwing around here don’t reflect any of those costs.

What with all the this and that and whatnot, it looks like the true energy efficiency of a petroleum-powered vehicle is about one-sixth what the sticker on the window at the dealer says it is. My 27 MPG Mazda really consumes six times as much energy; its actual mileage is more like 4.5 MPG. Most of that cost is picked up by taxpayers, and that doesn’t even count the cost of getting the oil to our shores.

In Jerry’s Perfect Economy, the cost of a gallon of gas and the cost of a kWh of electricity would be the total cost, including the cost of extraction, protecting supply, and mitigating the ecological consequences of consumption. In Jerry’s Perfect Economy, there would be no need for environmental protection laws. Conservation would be its own reward.

It’s hard to imagine Jerry’s Perfect Economy without a massive bureaucracy. So maybe it’s not quite so perfect. Still, a guy can dream.

So, in the end, how do MPG and MPGe compare? Well, your car rated at 30 MPG really gets only six. Your car rated at 90 MPGe really gets only 30. Score one for the electrics.

Other citations: I refer you to this California Pamphlet because the very first word of regular copy is a grammatical error. I didn’t read the rest.

ADDENDUM: It never occurred to me to actually tell the state of California that they had the pamphlet wrong. My sweetie, guardian of the English language, found someone in the government to raise the issue with, and hours later, it was fixed! Crazy! Here’s a link to the new version. The link above still points to one that is incorrect.

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Quick Note to Blogspot Folks

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Don’t know why it is, but when I try to post to your blogs using my OpenID, it doesn’t work. I’ve also failed with a couple other methods, and the remaining options are overly invasive. Tried two different blogs today (Dahveed, three times) without success.

Probably I’ll give in and use my fuckin’ Google credentials eventually, and hopefully that will work, but I’d really rather not. So, in the meantime, know that my silence is nothing personal.

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Happy Road Trip Day, 2013

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Today is 9.0 M.C. (Year 9, day 0 on the Muddled Calendar). I was annoyed last night when my technology woke me up, but then I realized that it was merely reminding me to repeat the Mantra of Good Fortune: If the first words you speak at the dawn of a new Muddled Year are “elevator, ocelot, rutabaga” then the coming year will be happy and prosperous. I muttered the Muddled Mantra and fell quickly back to sleep.

Nine years it’s been since I signed the receipt for the check for my house in San Deigo, joining the ranks of the affluent derelicts, and went to drive around for “a few weeks”. I was thinking maybe three weeks of seeing the US before I moved to Prague. That estimate was a poor one.

A lot has changed since those days; I’m gainfully employed again, in a pretty sweet gig that’s way easier than digging ditches but pays dramatically more. I didn’t invent this system, but I’m not complaining. I’ve got a sweetie to come home to and that’s the coolest change of all. By far.

A couple things have changed only recently; my morning workout and no-beer-till-below-target-weight-for-the-month plan (on hold today) are starting to show results, and I just feel good for the rest of the day after a vigorous morning workout.

Some things haven’t changed: I’m still working on getting a novel published, I still like beer, and overall I have a pretty rosy outlook on life. This blog just keeps chugging along, though perhaps the stories aren’t flavored with such exotic spice these days.

How’s the Muddled Age been treating you? Well, I hope.

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Slacker Banana

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one ripe banana
I’m not going to point fingers, but someone in this bunch isn’t giving 100%.

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Accuracy and Precision

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I climbed on our new bathroom scale for the first time last night. 188.8 lbs, it reported. I stepped off, waited for it to reset, and stepped on again. 188.8 pounds. That made me very happy. What are the chances I actually weighed 188.8 pounds? Pretty remote, I suspect. But I don’t need the scale to be accurate, I need it to be precise.

Rewind to the old bathroom scale. When I resolved to monitor my weight with actual numbers (which can be a trap), the light of my life obliged by bringing an old-school spring-driven scale into the bathroom. Cost: eight bucks. The thing was, shifting my weight or moving a foot would change the readout. If you weren’t concerned about exact numbers, the scale was plenty adequate for measuring a trend.

Once I set goals with exact weights involved, however, the cheapo scale became a source of frustration. Leaning forward to read the dial better changed the reading. Am I allowed to drink beer today or not? Answer unclear, ask again later.

My sweetie set out once again to find a scale that could answer that question. At CVS she found a thirty-dollar scale programmed to give you terribly ill-informed body-mass advice, a twenty-dollar one that… I don’t remember what its deal was, and a simple, ten-buck CVS-branded scale that rests in our bathroom now, easy-to-read and frightfully consistent. And precise. This morning the scale told me with giant LCDs that I weighed 188.4 pounds. I stepped off, waited, then stepped on again. 188.4. I smiled. That’s 1.6 pounds below the beer threshold for this month, and roughly ten pounds lighter than I was three weeks ago. Or five pounds. Or fifteen. Hard to say.

But next month, even if I remain skeptical of the number on the scale, I will be confident of the difference. And the difference is what this whole project is about.

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Gonna Miss That Guy

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I’m watching Douglas Murray’s first game in a Penguin sweater tonight, and the Pittsburgh announcers are gushing. “Not many guys in the league like him anymore. He hits someone and they just look like a rag doll sometimes.”

He’s still wears his number 3, over there with the Pens, and has already reminded the east-coast fans of the Great Wall of Murray (my sweetie’s phrase). He’s a big hitter, but not a thug. His hits are clean and even the guy who just discovered himself abruptly on the ice rarely has a problem with it. For all the hard hits, there are no cheap shots; he just knocks his opponent down. Both skate away to collide another day. Murray doesn’t get into fights very often.

The Pittsburgh announcers are right, there aren’t many guys like him in hockey anymore. He’s not a great skater, but he gets to where he needs to be (well… usually). A lot of slapshots have bounced off his body over the years, but knowing it’s going to hurt hasn’t stopped him from throwing himself in front of the next hurtling puck.

For Murray, I don’t think hockey is a job. I think he fully appreciates that he’s playing a game he loves for some pretty sweet money. And the ladies love him.

The Sharks produced a video honoring the man they had just traded; fans came up with better ones. The Sharks traded Murray to Pittsburgh for some draft picks, a forward-looking move. Then Pittsburgh picked up a couple more of the best players in the league. No doubt about it, Pittsburgh is making a run for the cup this year.

Next year, the Penguins won’t be able to pay all these guys. Murray will be an unrestricted free agent. He could sign with… the Sharks. That sentimental no-hard-feelings video? Step one in getting Murray back and cackling over the almost-free draft picks.

Whether or not that comes to pass, I wish Douglas Murray well. He is proof that hockey can be tough without being dirty, that you can be a hitter without being a thug. He is what’s right about hockey, and I will be his fan no matter what sweater he’s wearing.

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Fight Fiercely, Harvard

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Were they playing any team other than New Mexico, I’d be happy for them now.

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The Electric Lie

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Ride with me on this one; I’m kind of all over the place.

I read an article today that was the rebuttal to another article and both managed to miss the point entirely. I will summarize here, to save you the trouble of wading through tiresome posturing.

The seminal article was all about how the ‘drudges’ at the oil companies are the ones ensuring America’s energy future, while media darlings like Shai Agassi get magazine covers but don’t actually change anything. Mr. Agassi wrote the rebuttal, saying that his efforts to make electric cars practical were gaining traction, and were entirely relevant.

The only problem is, the two sides in this ‘debate’ have pretty much nothing to do with each other. Making all our cars electric will not solve our energy issues. The electricity has to come from somewhere.

I’ll give you that a massive power plant will produce more kWh per ton of carbon than an automobile engine. If that were the only part of the equation then we’d all be driving electric already. It would be the cheapest way to get around. Even today if everyone had to pay to mitigate the carbon put into the atmosphere for their activities electric might be ubiquitous, but I’m not so sure. There are other inefficiencies we have to take into account.

For instance: transmission costs. Even if the power plant is more efficient than a car engine, every mile of power line the electricity traverses represents loss. I once read (so it may or may not be true) that only 13% of the power generated at the Hoover Dam that sets out for Los Angeles actually gets there. The rest is broadcast into space. (It is actually warmer near the power lines. That is energy lost.) So, first step toward an energy-wise world is to generate locally. Solar panels may not be as efficient but if you put them right on the spot you can minimize transmission loss.

The thing is, energy pricing in this country is a joke. The US government puts crap-tons of your money behind fossil fuels, both directly and indirectly (rhymes with Iraq). We’ve all got together and put a couple trillion dollars into the pot to keep gas cheaper at the pump. Electricity prices are similarly skewed toward big producers. If the government were to get out of the energy price-fixing business, a few things would happen: 1) energy costs would skyrocket; 2) Efficiency would leap and waste would plummet – wind and solar would compete favorably; 3) The economy would crash, dragged down by industries that had come to rely on the taxpayer energy-subsidy crutch; 4) We would have to decide as a society how we’re going to deal with 86-year-old Pittsburgh resident Gladys Pulchowski, who can’t afford her heating bill this winter.

In my happy economic neverland, everyone would bitch about higher prices, but they’d buy more efficient products. They’d put extra insulation in their homes and drive something smaller than a Cadillac Escalade to work. Excess packaging would directly drive up the cost of a product. Folks would not bitch about the reduced federal deficit, but it would be there. People would pay for what they used, without the government artificially spreading the cost around (mostly to our kids).

The price of Perrier would include the energy cost of dragging a dang glass bottle of water over the ocean. Seriously. How does the current situation make sense?

Back on topic: Listening to the electric car guys, you’d think that generating electricity produced no emissions at all. In fact, around here there is a government stamp for ‘zero emissions vehicles’. That, my friends, is a lie. They are Somewhere-Else Emission Vehicles.

Then there’s the batteries. Depending on the car, there’s all sorts of toxic stuff in there. Lead is a favorite, but there are others. And the things are heavy. Most of the energy spent by a car is to move the car. Driver and passengers hardly figure in. Massive batteries just make things worse.

I’m going to toss that out again, so you can ponder and appreciate it. Almost all of the energy spent by a car is to move the car, not the contents. That’s not terribly efficient. Currently the auto makers of the world are managing to improve their engines enough to avoid the inevitable truth: sooner or later we aren’t going to be willing (or able) to pay to move a big pile of metal and plastic around with us wherever we want to go. (Defying that math are the scooters of today getting less than two hundred miles per gallon – less than one-tenth the mass, but only getting three times better mileage. Clearly I’m oversimplifying, but by that much?)

I think someday we’ll all be driving electric. If energy were priced rationally, we already would be, charging our batteries from local sources.

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Tweaking the Health Regimen

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The light of my life and I bought a fancy elliptical trainer a couple of years ago. She has been very consistent with it, while I’ve been, well, streaky. There are times I come home from work and I’m just too wiped out to contemplate getting on the thing. (On days I do manage to get up on it, I’m glad I did, but that lesson is soon forgotten.) I’m definitely healthier, but I’m no skinnier. In fact, I’m bigger than ever.

The obvious answer, of course, is to climb up on that bad boy first thing in the morning, before I’ve had time to start making excuses. Alarm goes off (dreadfully early), I drag my sorry ass out of bed and grind out my time. So far, I’ve been very consistent with this approach, and I think I arrive at work more alert and cheerful. And hungry. Gotta love the oatmeal bar at the little coffee place in the building. More on the hunger shortly.

One thing I have observed about working out first thing in the morning: It’s much harder to meet my goals. I’m going into max energy burn after fasting for a few hours, and I hit the proverbial bottom of the tank way sooner that I do when I work out in the evening. I’ve had to adjust my expectations accordingly.

I did some research to see if there was some food I could eat only moments before exercising that could help me power through. Turns out, not so much. But I did learn another interesting thing: What I eat right after I exercise can make a big difference next time. There is a window after exercise in which the body grabs all the energy it can out of the blood stream to convert to store in muscles as glycogen. Get the carbs (and some protein) rolling during that window and things will be better the next day. Pretty sweet!

I started comparing different foods for the right carb-protein balance (nonfat chocolate milk apparently is about perfect and has nutrients the commercial sports recovery drinks lack). I was about three days into this process when I started to wonder:

Isn’t it good when I run out of gas while working out? Isn’t that kind of the goal of all this?

All the advice I’d read, you see, was targeted at athletes. For them, high output while exercising is the goal. Not so much for me. I want to create conditions where my body (reluctantly) chooses to break down some of that stored energy in my fat cells and use that to restore the glycogen in my muscles. This process is far less efficient, and the human body really is loath to give up its precious fat, but during that same window where the body will suck every carb out of the bloodstream, if there aren’t enough carbs, it will convert just enough fat to keep things running.

My muscles aren’t replenished as much, and the next morning’s workout will be tougher. But ideally the energy is coming from the right place.

By the time I get to work, that window has closed, and my insides have returned to business as usual. And I’m about ready to eat an entire pizza. Hooray for oatmeal! It’s carb-heavy, but low-fat and sticks to the ribs and by lunchtime I’m able to make more sensible choices as well.

So, with such a sensible system, the pounds must be flying off, right?

Well, not so much. Not yet, anyway. I’m absolutely certain that I’m on the right track, and like any long-term project, it’s best to keep expectations of instant and dramatic success tempered. But I have recently made one more change, a dramatic, desperate gesture of good health beyond all reason.

I have a target weight this month. Next month, the target weight goes down. Each morning as I prepare to exercise, I step on the scales. If I’m above the target, no alcohol that day. No beer after work, no wine with dinner. I like beer and wine. While cutting alcohol will definitely reduce my caloric intake, there is a second, even more powerful, indirect effect. When the alarm clock goes off in the morning and I just want to stay in bed, I remind myself that shirking on my exercise will only delay my next sip of sweet beer. On days I don’t bring lunch from home I think about the consequences of eating the wrong thing: Another meal with my sweetie, with no wine for me.

A coworker laughed when I told him this story, imagining me on a treadmill running full-speed for a beer hanging just out of reach. That’s not far from the truth. But if it works, that’s all right with me.

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A Couple of Nature Shots

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It is spring here in my little slice of heaven, and recently I’ve pointed my camera at flowers and stuff. Here is a shot or three of the results. There are things I’d like to change in each, but it’s a lazy Saturday and putting up pictures on a blog is easier than many of the other things I’m supposed to be getting done. For whatever reason, these look a lot better when you click on them to biggerize.

I forget what this flower is called, but it's nice.

I forget what this flower is called, but it’s nice.

I’m tempted to monkey with this photo more to make the flower pop better, but that’s really not how this plant rolls. It’s not a popper. I wish I’d stopped down a bit more to get the fungus on the log a little more in focus.

Apparently these are very bad to eat.

Apparently these are very bad to eat.

I really like this one, except for one frustration: the one point in the entire picture that the eye is first drawn, the little bit of grot on the mushroom cap, is just the tiniest bit out of focus (105mm lens very close to the mushroom means very shallow depth of field even at f/4). It’s hard to get the focus just right when you’re holding the camera at arm’s length. The focus is close enough that my eyes try to adjust, which of course doesn’t work and merely annoys them. Still and all, I’m pretty happy with it.

Not sure the tree, either.

Not sure the tree, either.

This is a cropped section of a set of pics I took this afternoon to feed a larger episode about photo composition, depth of focus, and bokeh (and when bokeh isn’t all it’s cracked up to be). That’s the episode I should be working on right now. There are a couple of nice bright-pink-on-deep-blue-sky shots in the batch I look forward to sharing.

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Christian Mingle, Random Numbers, and Prayer

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I typed the above title into my bloggotool a few days ago, thinking I’d get back to it when I had time. I vaguely remember the point I was going to make. Let’s see how this goes.

Christian Mingle is an online matchmaking service for Christian folks. It makes sense; there are a lot of people for whom a partner must be of the same religion, and it wouldn’t surprise me if same-faith relationships tend to last longer (though there is likely precious little in the way of unbiased data on the subject — it’s one of those simple-sounding propositions that turns out to be a bitch to measure. But I digress…).

Anyway, my memory of the site’s tagline is fuzzy, but it’s something like, “find God’s match for you.” So you see, they are presenting themselves as an agent of God, a conduit that allows the Big Guy to work his subtle magic. I’ve heard crazier things. But then I thought some more (perhaps too much), and I realized that most likely they apply mathematical comparison algorithms to find the best matches, as do the rest of the matchmaking sites. In fact, they are probably a branded front end on one of the other major services. It’s all math, and it’s deterministic. The same data in will produce the same result. If God wants Sally to be with Jorge, but the numbers say she should be with Marcel, what’s He gonna do?

Although random numbers in computers aren’t truly random, they’re unpredictable enough that a deity could jigger them now and then and no one would be the wiser. If Christian Mingle threw a lot of entropy at the problem, they could create the wiggle room God needs to work His will. Clients would fill out a detailed questionnaire, send it in, and Christian Mingle could match them up randomly and bickety-bam, God’s will is done. Sally’s with Jorge.

(Note that God’s will does not necessarily translate to what’s best for the individuals involved.)

Generating the random number is much like prayer, except that now we have a machine to perform that tedious task for us. We are appealing to a higher power for guidance, trusting ourselves to His plan. For marketing, I would suggest to Christian Mingle that they substitute the phrase “Divine Guidance” for “Random Number” in their brochures.

Meanwhile, I’m going to go home and whip up a quick “pray for my soul” script. I have a feeling I’m going to need it.

Thanks!