Quick comparison between the Tanberg Precision HD camera I (over)bought at the outset of the pandemic for remote work, and the iPhone 14 Pro in Continuity Camera mode:
Tanberg Precision HD
iPhone 14 Pro
My “office” is nicely lit but my computer faces the wall, so I am always lit from the side and from behind… not optimal. The iPhone is leagues beyond the Tanberg… admittedly low spec in this day and age.
Webcams are getting Sherlocked.
Rowing Level has a great section of their site for seeing how your rowing performance compares to others, as generally or specifically as you like. I can’t vouch for the validity of the data, but I am in the novice range for both the 7500 and 10k rows I’ve been favoring as of late:
Novice, for Rowing Level, is someone who has been rowing for “at least” six months, which is true for me currently and includes the time I spent rowing back in 2015-16. That first jag lasted from March 2015 through January 2016, but I was at most rowing every other day then, and it eventually tapered off to nothing when I decided to start lifting weights.
Another thing about my first stab: I was good about keeping data, but I didn’t use it to progress and didn’t vary my workouts ( I mostly did steady state of either 5000k or 30 mins). This go-round, especially recently, finds me scrutinizing my stats and increasing my goals. I started simply, following Apple Fitness + workouts. A new rower with a PM5 has changed my data game a bit and it’s exciting… and motivating.
I’ve sucked in the neighborhood of 50 pounds off of my frame. And I’m excited to row. Every day.
“Each of us is inevitable. Each of us is limitless.” – Walt Whitman
It’s a question as old as therapy itself, and one insurance adjusters are keen to answer. I have always thought that most studies come up with about a 50% success rate… similar to a placebo.
The most significant difference in patient outcomes, Wampold says, almost always lies in the skills of the therapist, rather than the techniques they rely on. Hundreds of studies have shown that the strength of the patient-therapist bond — a patient’s sense of safety and alignment with the therapist on how to reach defined goals — is a powerful predictor of how likely that patient is to experience results from therapy. But what distinguishes the therapists most likely to forge those bonds is not intuitive. Wampold says that some of the attributes that would seem most salient — a therapist’s agreeability, years of training, years of experience — do not correlate at all with effectiveness of care.
Maybe it’s the relationship that matters, not the discipline.
Hugh Jackman, who is to Wolverine what Robert Downey Jr is to Tony Stark, prefers rowing to keep fit:
“There’s a reason the rower’s usually empty at the gym—because it’s difficult,” he said. “And a lot of people want to say it and feel they’ve worked out, and they want to get a sweat, but they don’t necessarily… And the rowing machine—I think if you add in some chest work, some pushups, that’s everything you need to keep fit, healthy, strong… It’s such a good building exercise for deadlifts and all these core movements, compound movements, getting your scapula—everything sort of in the right place—and your breathing and relaxing your neck, you know, at the same time as doing it.”
I scrubbed up to the section of the Tim Ferriss podcast to listen to where Jackman dishes on rowing. He said that all you need is 7 minutes, four times a week. But then he said something like “shoot for 2000.” I thought at first that that’s a pretty light bit of rowing for someone in good shape. But then I realized maybe he’s talking about getting 2k in 7 minutes, which would be a pretty impressive split time of 1:45. That makes a bit more sense.
Hugh Jackman Just Shared Some of His Best Workout and Training Advice With Tim Ferriss.
Jared Andrukanis, quoted from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography in Vanity Fair:
He put a lot of everything in that basket–he shoveled his work life, his personal life, he shoveled his persona into his relationship, and that is a recipe for fucking disaster, no matter who you are.
“That basket” being his relationship with Asia Argento, for whom he appeared to be limerent right up to his tragic end.
Alia Wong, writing for The Atlantic:
One easy fix: a little bell-schedule rejiggering so that middle-schoolers can fuel their growing appetites when their bodies need it. Cruz’s school, Oyster-Adams, decided to implement a 20-minute snack break at 10:45 a.m. so the district’s existing lunchtime for the school (which also serves younger grades on another part of campus) wouldn’t leave her with hangry tweens. Another change: Middle-school classrooms should budget for air conditioning—tween bodies do not smell or feel good when it’s stuffy inside. Of course, the structural changes that benefit one community of preteens may not make sense in another.
Would that it were so easy.
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We spend our lives trying to anchor our transience in some illusion of permanence and stability. We lay plans, we make vows, we backbone the flow of uncertainty with habits and routines that lull us with the comforting dream of predictability and control, only to find ourselves again and again bent at the knees with surrender to forces and events vastly larger than us. In those moments, kneeling in a pool of the unknown, the heart breaks open and allows life — life itself, not the simulacrum of life that comes from control — to rush in.
Maria Popova, reviewing Tina Davidson’s Let Your Heart Be Broken
I was surprised to learn that, like iA Writer, OneNote can create a new note using brackets (aka wikilinks). It’s a handy shortcut that can save you some time and clicks. Here’s how it works:
Inside the brackets, type the title of your new note. For example, [[My Shopping List]].
Press Enter or click outside the brackets.
Voila! You have created a new note with the title you typed. You can see it in your notebook list on the left.
(This shortcut works in OneNote for Windows 10, OneNote 2016, and OneNote Online. You can also use it to link to existing notes by typing their titles inside the brackets.)
This is pretty bananas: Todoist uses AI to figure out the steps that likely comprise a project and will allow you to add the result of the search to Todoist. Using the (experimental) AI feature adds the resulting recommended steps to your Todoist account as a multistep project.
It’s easy to get into hype mode about AI, but I can see this kind of functionality making figuring out the next step in an a project a bit easier.
I tried “conduct a functional behavioral assessment” using Todoist’s AI and it returned a complete, if not terribly specific, set of steps.
Click on the three dots to expose the menu where the AI assistant lurks
Type your search in the box
Choose the recommended steps you want to add
The updated post in Todoist
In my post about building a better me, I was a bit cagey about my weight loss. I’m going to keep some info secret still, but I thought I’d flesh (see what I did there?) it out a bit more here.
Again, I had not taken a formal baseline after the first of the year as a starting point; I regret doing this, but I was skeptical of my ability to hold fast to anything for a period of time and quite frankly didn’t want to see the number.
After a month of restriction and additional exercies, I was happy to find that I was slipping into some older pants and jeans. For example, I was taking my son to a robotics event in nearby Camden County, and I tried on a pair of black jeans I hadn’t worn in forever.
And they fit.
So I hopped on the scale.
Since that day, I have lost an additional 21 pounds. I have read that it takes about 15 pounds to drop a pants size, so I’m gonna hazzard a guess that I lost between 15 to 20 in January, and then, as you’ll see below, an additional 21. So that’s 36 to 41 pounds total. It’s a good amount to lose, I figured.
But it’s also a safe amount, really; it’s about two pounds a week. Between 4/6/2023 and 4/18/2023, I dropped four pounds, so that’s the deal.
date Week Pounds Lost
01/28/2023 Week 04 ?
02/30/2023 Week 05 .5
02/07/2023 Week 06 1
02/10/2023 Week 06 1.5
02/17/2023 Week 07 1
02/24/2023 Week 08 1
03/08/2023 Week 10 5
03/15/2023 Week 11 2
03/27/2023 Week 13 1.5
04/06/2023 Week 14 3
04/18/2023 Week 16 4
Daryl Austin, Writing for The Atlantic:
Although a perpetrator might use the silent treatment in many different scenarios, this is what every scenario has in common: “People use the silent treatment because they can get away with it without looking abusive to others,” Williams explained, “and because it’s highly effective in making the targeted individual feel bad.”
The silent treatment is a particularly insidious form of abuse because it might force the victim to reconcile with the perpetrator in an effort to end the behavior, even if the victim doesn’t know why they’re apologizing. “It’s especially controlling because it deprives both sides from weighing in,” Williams said. “One person does it to the other person, and that person can’t do anything about it.”
What You’re Saying When You Give Someone the Silent Treatment
Angela Haupt, writing at Time, about social media’s misuse of clinical terminology:
While terms like gaslighting have existed in therapeutic practice for decades or longer, most only started to become common lingo within the past few years, fueled by use on social-media platforms. One viral Reddit post or TikTok video is all it takes for the masses to latch onto a previously overlooked word.
TikTok is awash with “coaches” of dubious credibility helping everyone see how they were trauma-bonded to a narcissist. The unmediated Psych-101-ism is appalling. Sending an apology gift of flowers isn’t love bombing, disagreeing isn’t gaslighting, and calling it quits over different expectations doesn’t mean a relationship was toxic.
Here we have a “coach” authoritatively listing the 7 stages of a trauma bond
Three, just three
Inside the mind (and pickup truck) of a narcissist
Trauma Bonding Done Right
If your SO says four out of six of these things, he’s a narcissist. We have more videos for you to watch if that’s the case. You can also sign up for a coaching session.
Gaslighting, Narcissist, and More Psychology Terms You’re Misusing
Following up on my article about health metrics, the New York Times has an article about some details you can pay attention to instead of weight. Included were some of the metrics the Apple Watch reports.
One measure is resting heart rate:
Resting heart rate refers to the number of times your heart beats in a minute while you’re not exerting yourself. The better your cardiovascular fitness, the lower your resting heart rate is likely to be because the heart can pump more blood with every beat. Fewer beats mean the heart is working more efficiently, pushing the same amount of blood through the body with less effort.
A normal resting heart rate for healthy adults is between 60 and 80 beats per minute. Athletes commonly have a lower resting heart rate, sometimes dropping below 60 beats per minute. If your resting heart rate is above 80, regular aerobic exercise could help you lower it over time.
The mysterious heart rate variability is also mentioned, and while the explanation is interesting, there’s no discussion of a healthy score or range.
While we often think of the heart as a metronome, beating at a steady pace, there are actually small variations in the length of each beat and the time between them. “At rest, very low heart rate variability shows that the heart is just doing all it can to keep up,” Dr. Lundstrom said. “The more fit you are, the more your heart has the ability to adapt and adjust really quickly to changing demands.”
3 Ways to Measure How Fit You Are, Without Focusing on Weight
Late fall 2022 through Christmas break (aka “The Week Between“), a number of factors, including but not limited to vanity and mendacity, conspired to inspire me to make some changes in myself. In an aspirational fit of hopefulness, I made a list of goals for myself. The categories:
Regarding health and fitness, I wanted to do the following:
I won’t get into everything here, but I want to highlight the degree to which I was able to follow some metrics to chart my progress. I used my Apple Watch and a couple of apps to keep track. I checked my updated stats each day in the health app on my phone. But first, what did I do?
First, and not necessarily in the order of the impact I imagine it makes, I row in the morning before work for 30 minutes. I drink less, but don’t teetotal. I eat less, because I drink less, because where there are big martinis, there are glasses of wine to follow, and too much dinner usually follows suit.
I am luck to have a Concept 2 ergometer in the basement. I’m lucky, too, I suppose, to have a large basement, and to work and live in the same city. I row for 30 minutes most days, using Apple Fitness+ to structure my workouts. I started off following the stroke rate recommended by the trainers, but I blew past their versions of easy, hard, medium, and “all out” a while ago. I warm up around 33 s/m, and push up above 35 s/m for all-out efforts. I use Drafts and a configured action to log the distance and speed. I rowed a good bit back in 2015, and I have surpassed my stats from then.
I used the Reframe app to learn a bit about the impact of drinking and to log my drinks. This was helpful briefly, but I settled on what I consider a reasonable amount to consume each day (tiny martini and a bit less than a glass of wine per night). I sleep better, most nights. I take less famotidine. I save money. And more good things, as you’ll read below.
I didn’t really change anything except quantity here. I’m not afraid to miss a meal, because I don’t feel bad if I do. And when dining out, I usually don’t finish what I order. I eat about half and take the rest home. I can always eat more later if I under-eat, but that never happens. Did I mention I eat less when I drink less? Ah, yes. I did. It’s true. That’s like a two-fer.
The Health app on the iPhone reports that my blood oxygen ranged from 88-100 over the last week. It has gone down as low as 77% in the past year… but not lately. I like to see it up around 97% or so, and although it does dip into the mid-90s, it’s usually in the range 97-100%. This is the so-called COVID feature on the Apple Watch. As the sampled bands of data move towards the present day, I see my blood oxygen moving up from 77-100 to 88-100, most recently.
I got a warning a while back that I had “low cardio fitness,” which is what Apple calls V02 max.This is basically how efficiently your body uses oxygen. At the time of the low cardio fitness warning, I was exercising regularly, but only strength training. This sustained period of rowing has seen my average move up from aroudn 24 to over 30, and I’m on the precipice of breaking into “low average.” That sounds bad as I write it, but it’s the truth that it has taken a sustained effort to make a dent in this.
My walking heart rate went from an average of 107 BPM to 93 BPM for the last five weeks. I have never felt winded or tired walking, but it’s good to know that my heart finds this essential activity less impressive and worthy of exertion than it once did.
This measures how much my heart rate drops within a minute after reaching its peak during exercise. When rowing, my heart rate gets as high as about 165 BPM (alhtough it has gotten highter, into the mid-170s). For the nine months leading up to my experiment, my heart rate would drop by about 12 BPM after exercising. For the past 17 weeks, I’ve seen an average of 20 BPM, athough for the last week, I’ve seen a drop of almost 30 points. The more readiliy your heart rate recovers to a more normal rate after exertion, the more healthy you are.
My resting heart rate has dropped over 10 points, from 83 to 73. This means that when at rest, like sitting at my desk or at a meeting, my heart beats 10 times less per minute. I remember a karate instructor saying once that your heart only has so many beats in it, so make them count. So: a more efficient heart.
I burn over 250 more calories per day for the past nine weeks. It must be more than that, because I’ve been burning anywhere from 250 to 300+ calories each morning that I row. (I bench press one day per weekend and managed to keep my 1 RM over 200 despite a break in the action due to shoulder problems.)
My doctor doubled my blood pressure medicine last fall. I recently knocked the dosage back to the original, because I felt dizzy a few times after taking it. I take my BP religiously to keep an eye on it, and it’s almost always below 120/80. As with rowing, I type the diastolic/systolic/heart rate data into Drafts, and fire an action to append this to a text file in iCloud.
This is a stubborn and somewhat mysterious metric, but it too has crept up from below 20, and in some individual caess much lower, to often spiking during the day into the 30s and 40s. I know it’s low if I’m tired or in a blue mood. I am usually pleasantly surpised to see a higher number, but often reflect that I was busy and not terribly reflective when the number is at its highest.
What besides data? Cheekbones! I have them. I got into my “skinny” pants and then blew past that benchmark, having to go out and get some new trim fitting chinos, and even two pair of size 34 jeans. 34! I wore that size in college, for a while. And in high school. High school.
So that begs the question of weight. I’m not going into specifics, but I started paying attention to my weight (not daily) about a month into this shredfest, after I’d managed to squeeze myself into some long-relegated-to-the-back-of-the-closet jeans. But I’ve shed an additional 12 pounds since then, so I’m gonna guess it’s around 30 lbs.
I even signed up for a testosterone blood test, which I paid for myself. I have never been a swarthy beast, prone to slavering over women or getting in fights. I wondered where I might be on the T scale. I wasn’t one to prowl for women in college or seek conquest. Turns out I’m in the upper range of average on the normal band, where between 200+ and 800 is considered normal. I got a 700 ng/dl (no, I don’t know how much is free T). Not bad for an middle-aged guy with a sedentary job. As with my weight, I didn’t take a baseline measurement, so for all I know, it went down. But I doubt it. It doesn’t mean much, I guess, but I will confess that I expected to be worried by the result.
It’s one of those reminders from the cosmos that you shouldn’t avoid things you’re afraid of.
I attribute the dedicated rowing and caloric restriction to everything. I want to pat myself on the back for doing it, and of course i did have to drag myself down in the basement every morning, and forgo some food, and drink less when I might have fancied another glass of wine or a larger cocktail. But it’s just what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a better version of me.
Still do. So I’m sticking with it.
I was on a meeting last week and the topic of email management came up. Our superintendent has his secretary filter his email for him. A building principal said he has tried using Gmail Labels to make his email more manageable. Having made some comments about my technology collection (conspicuous in my background), it was suggested that I might have an opinion on managing email.
My Device Box Collection
And I do.
I wrote about my particular setup here, at the time using Apple Mail. (I’ve since moved to MailMate, which works the same way as Mail in this regard.) But most people use Gmail in a web browser, and happily, there’s a way to do pretty much exactly the same thing.
I don’t think labels are terribly helpful in Gmail, and the process of labeling or tagging is laborious. Users are likely to give up on them after a while when time grows short and the backlog gets too long. And backlogs really are the trick: the problem with email is that it never stops, and you’re likely to get overwhelmed and give up on it after a while.
The trick is to make it look like there is less to process than is: you make your inbox look smaller. You can use Gmail’s excellent Search Operators to accomplish this bit of self-deception.
My Gmail Inbox, Unfiltered: lots of messages
Here are some examples; type them into Gmail’s search field (replacing “user@gmail.com” with your email address:
to:user@gmail.com label:inbox newer_than:1d
to:user@gmail.com label:inbox newer_than:2d
So what are you filtering here? In the first example, email that came in within the last 24 hours that’s still in your inbox. In the second, anything in your inbox from the last two days. Add days as you need, replacing “newer_than:1d” with 3d, 4d, etc. You’re including your email address, because you’re skipping, for now, any org-wide blasts, distribution lists, and marketing stuff.
Why in your inbox? Because if it’s been archived to All Mail or deleted, you don’t need to see it any more. You already decided what you were going to do with that email.
Do you want to see yesterday’s email, but not today’s? Not a problem:
to:user@gmail.com label:inbox newer_than:2d older_than:1d
Again, you’re using Gmail’s search operators to show you email that came in in the last two days, but adding that you only want those messages to be older than a day. So it’s the last two days’ worth of email, but nothing that came in in the last 24 hours.
It’s not perfect, but what you’re doing is reducing the visual array before your eyes. You can focus on today’s email, and get most of that processed, and then back up to yesterday. And then the day before that. Process as much as a time as you can, without overwhelming yourself.
Gmail filtered: Today’s Messages Only
One quick parting note: Saved searches don’t really work for this, because the filters don’t update themselves after you move or delete an email. That doesn’t sound like a deal breaker, but it is to me.
What’s a solution? Create text snippets and use an application like TextExpander or AutoHotKey to trigger your favorite defaults. I use the former, but anything will do. Mac users and iOS users can even use the build in the system-wide text expansion feature.