Asymmetric Abs

The picture is a little crappy, but my camera doesn't take such great pictures without daylight.

I noticed yesterday that my top 4 abs are asymmetric. I'm still working on building up the bottom 4. I've noticed on the cover of muscle magazines that bodybuilders and really ripped dudes rarely have symmetric abs. I don't plan on being really ripped, but I guess it's a possibility if I can get in the gym on a regular basis (which doesn't seem like a possibility right now, mostly due to a lack of motivation).

It's really nice to see results from working out. Makes me appreciate the ab work that I've done in the last couple weeks. Maybe now with a better diet, I could work on those bottom ones.

Max VO2 Max

I am participating in a study at FSU that's testing the effect of static stretching on endurance runners. Today I went to get my body composition and VO2 Max tested. Next week, I'll run for 30 minutes at 65% of my VO2 Max then either stretch or sit quietly, then run another 30 minutes as far as I can without being able to see how fast I'm going or how far or how long I've gone...but I will be able to control the speed.

The old lab record for VO2 Max was 68 mL O2/kg body weight/minute. Today I ran at 77 mL O2/kg body weight/minute. Check out this website to see how off the charts that is. Also, my body fat was 7.4%...nothing to write home about, but not bad. My max heart rate was 198, but I'm convinced it was higher when I was skydiving!

Striking Similarity

I was looking at some pictures from Spain that were taken by other people. I think this one came from Mani (it was in the folder Spain Pix\Not my pictures\Espana\Granada, which I think the nomenclature of the files & folders matches his style). Compare this to the picture I posted on November30, 2006 called "Flower Light." I thought it was actually one of my pictures that somehow made it into the wrong folder on my computer. Turns out that this one is taken from a slightly different angle. I've found a few other pictures that are very similar to ones I took.

Pick #50

Watched Pots - "Triple Deke" from they're more afraid of you than you are of them

You can get this entire album from dude's website. I've been listening to it a little bit lately with Triple Deke as my favorite song, but that may change after some more listens. It's free, so it's totally worth your time. Dude wants people to listen, so hook him up.

Nobody to Call

I decided to run today because my achilles is feeling better. I got about 4 minutes into it and decided to turn around and walk back home. Bummer. Running feels so good, but I guess it will have to wait a little longer. I decided to ride my bike to Georgia instead. When I was about 25-30 minutes away from home, I realized that I forgot to bring money with me and that I would probably need to refill my water bottle. On the way back, I ended up getting a gas station guy to fill it up in the sink. After that, I saw a guy next to his truck on the side of the road holding a gas can. I stopped and asked if he needed to call anyone. He said that he didn't have anyone to call. I wonder if that's because he's from somewhere else...I don't remember what his license plate said. I hope that he's just far from home instead of being devoid of friends. He had put a dollar's worth of gas in his truck, but that's all he had. I would have offered him a couple bucks if I had any with me. I wonder how much longer he stood there before anyone helped him.

I'll now mention that he was a black dude, probably about 35-40 years old because I'm wondering if, statistically speaking, black people have to wait longer than white people in a roadside situation before anyone helps them. I doubt that there's a good way to measure that, except with phony, small-sample field experiments which would be plagued by all kinds of design failures that would render the results useless.

I'll now diverge on a racism note. I'm learning in my UR class that there's a lot more racism in America than I thought. We've been looking at it in the housing market and public choice. I'm not sure if it's comforting or not, but a lot of discrimination can be explained by income. However, even after controlling for income, blacks still get the short end of the stick. I wonder if this will change in the future. For instance, my parents went through race riots in high school, when integration was still in its infancy. I wonder if we'll have more equality when members of my generation are in charge of lending institutions, apartment complexes, public policy, and the like. I think that we are on average less racist than our parents. I don't know if/when that will manifest itself in better equality in our country.

Instinct

Nick has a theory about food that certain colors go together. One day I was making chicken, bacon, & ranch to put in a sandwich. Nick said it looked like it wanted something green, so he threw in some green peppers. Yesterday, he put a glass of Maker's Mark in front of me and said "just look at that...I want to drink it." He said that the color just looked appetizing. I think it's kind of cool how we can eat things that are bright yellow or purple ketchup or (Sarah's favorite) blue raspberry. Those colors aren't normally good for you. In fact, instinct should tell you to stay away from them. However, we've been conditioned enough by living in our cushy non-survival-of-the-fittest-kind of world that we don't hesitate to pop some neon colored food or drink in our mouths.

Nick asked what do we have left in our repertoire of actions that could be attributed to instinct? He suggested sex. I don't know. I think that it's possible for someone who's been kept in isolation to have instinctual feelings about sex, maybe even a good idea of how to do it. However, I'm pretty sure that the sex that surrounds us on TV and billboards, conversation and radio songs, books and paintings, has led to a rewiring of that instinct. I mean, you should never instinctively even consider a Cleveland Steamer (nor should you even think about actually doing it). Nick's only valid example of an instinct is suckling. He says that babies know how to suckle and nobody teaches them. I agreed. I said what about breathing? I guess that falls in the category of nearly continuous autonomous functions, which don't count. What about getting into the fetal position to comfort yourself? Does that count?

I think that the only way you can know that something is an instinct is to react to a stimulus in a split second in a situation for which you've never been trained, conditioned, or informed. This significantly reduces the possible space of opportunities to find that you actually have some sort of instinct. Other things that we're programmed to do may fall beneath your perception. For instance, when cold water hits your face, your heart immediately slows down and your blood vessels contract in your extremities. While you may just write that off as a physiological reaction, how else would you define an instinct?

No Such Thing as Indie Anymore

Nick told me that he heard people discussing that with the advent of internet sites like myspace, there's no longer any truly "independent" musicians (to a lesser extent artists of any kind) anymore. They might not have a major record label behind them, but they do have access to millions of potential fans through a popular website. Furthermore, any artists can put their music up on sites like mp3.com or last.fm. In fact, we ran into Micah (the American Studies guy) at a concert on Monday (Maylene & the Sons of Disaster, Poison the Well, Underoath). Micah clarified that it means something entirely different to be independent these days than it did 10-15 years ago.

Apparently some folks get upset when you suggest that their fav indie band is not actually "independent." I'm not entirely sure why you'd get upset about a thing like that. I guess it's like the thing when there's a song that's been your favorite by that band and then you hear it on the radio...you feel like something that you had an intimate connection with is now property of the masses (who obviously don't deserve proprietorship of this item). Maybe it's just a subcultural thing that you don't want to have tainted by the grimy hands of the masses. I guess I can agree that it's a bad thing for an "independent" band to blow up, sell out, and start making suckier music. However, I think major-record-label-signing would be a positive phenomenon if bands could maintain their style and everything else that the fans love them for.