Energy In America

Thanks to Dave for this link.

Have you ever been walking with someone and then suddenly realized you are walking much slower than you normally walk, to match their stride? Have you had the opposite experience where you found yourself walking at a much faster clip just to keep up with the person you are walking with? This is what happens in our lives. We end up matching the pace of the people around us.

Jim Rohn taught that we become the combined average of the five people we hang around the most. Rohn would say we could tell the quality of our health, attitude, and income by looking at the people around us. The people with whom we spend our time determine what conversations dominate our attention, and to which attitudes and opinions we are regularly exposed.

Eventually, we start to eat what they eat, talk like they talk, read what they read, think like they think, watch what they watch, treat people how they treat them, even dress like they dress. The funny thing is, more often than not, we are completely unaware of the similarities between us and our circle of five.

The influence your friends have over you is subtle and can be positive or negative; either way, the impact is incredibly powerful. According to research by Harvard social psychologist David McClelland, your reference group determines as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.

Zig Ziglar puts it even simpler. He says, “If you want to fly with the eagles you can’t continue to scratch with the turkeys.” Watch out! You cannot hang out with negative people and expect to live a positive life.

So, who do you spend the most time with? Who are the people you most admire? Are those two groups of people exactly the same? If not, why not? What is the combined average income, health, or attitudes of the five people you spend most of your time with? Does the answer frighten you?

If so, the best way to increase your potential for whatever traits you desire, is to spend the majority of your time with people who already possess those traits. You will then see the power of influence working for you, rather than against you. The behaviors and attitudes which helped them acquire the success you admire will begin to become part of your daily routine. Hang around them long enough and you’re likely to realize similar successful outcomes in your life.

Along with Windows 7 comes some new Microsoft tools called Windows LIve

http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/windows-live-essentials-does-it-hit-or-miss-mark-775?page=0,0

I am using Windows Live Writer to edit and upload this blog post. Seems like a convenient way to go. I have also used Windows Live Movie Maker with some good results considering the short learning curve. I have seen some codec bugs on long movie conversions.

Phys Ed: The Men Who Stare at Screens

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS (NYT)

In 1982, researchers affiliated with the Cooper Institute in Dallas surveyed a large group of well-educated, affluent men. The researchers were interested in the men’s exercise habits, but they also asked, almost incidentally, about their indolence. Specifically, they inquired about how many hours each day the men spent watching television or sitting in a car. (This was before you could do both at once.) Over the years, the survey’s main results were used to reinforce a growing body of science about the health benefits of regular exercise.

But the information about the amount of time the men spent being inactive remained largely unexplored. Recently, however, scientists from the University of South Carolina and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., parsed the full data. In a study published in May in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, they reported that, to no one’s surprise, the men who sat the most had the greatest risk of heart problems. Men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching TV and sitting in their cars (as passengers or as drivers) had a 64 percent greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours a week or less. What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised. Quite a few of them said they did so regularly and led active lifestyles. The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their risk of heart disease soared, despite the exercise. Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting.

Most of us have heard that sitting is unhealthy. But many of us also have discounted the warnings, since we spend our lunch hours conscientiously visiting the gym. We consider ourselves sufficiently active. But then we drive back to the office, settle at our desks and sit for the rest of the day. We are, in a phrase adopted by physiologists, ‘‘active couch potatoes.’’

The amount of time that most Americans spend being inactive has risen steadily in recent decades. A 2009 editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that, on average, adults spend more than nine hours a day in oxymoronic ‘‘sedentary activities.’’ For studies like these, scientists categorize activities by the number of METs they demand. A MET, or metabolic equivalent of task, is a measure of energy, with one MET being the amount of energy you burn lying down for one minute. Sedentary behaviors demand one to one and a half METs, or very little exertion.

Decades ago, before the advent of computers, plasma TVs and Roombas, people spent more time completing ‘‘light-intensity activities,’’ which require between one and a half and three METs. Most ‘‘home activities,’’ like mopping, cooking and changing light bulbs, demand between two and three METs. (One exception is ‘‘butchering animals,’’ a six-MET activity, according to a bogglingly comprehensive compilation from 2000 of the METs associated with different activities.) Nowadays, few of us accumulate much light-intensity activity. We’ve replaced those hours with sitting.

The physiological consequences are only slowly being untangled. In a number of recent animal studies, when rats or mice were not allowed to amble normally around in their cages, they rapidly developed unhealthy cellular changes in their muscles. The animals showed signs of insulin resistance and had higher levels of fatty acids in their blood. Scientists believe the changes are caused by a lack of muscular contractions. If you sit for long hours, you experience no ‘‘isometric contraction of the antigravity (postural) muscles,’’ according to an overview of the consequences of inactivity published this month in Exercise and Sports Sciences Reviews. Your muscles, unused for hours at a time, change in subtle fashion, and as a result, your risk for heart disease, diabetes and other diseases can rise.

Regular workout sessions do not appear to fully undo the effects of prolonged sitting. ‘‘There seem to be different pathways’’ involved in the beneficial physiological effects of exercising and the deleterious impacts of sitting, says Tatiana Warren, a graduate student in exercise science at the University of South Carolina and the lead author of the study of men who sat too much. ‘‘One does not undo the other,’’ she says.

You can, however, ameliorate the dangers of inactivity with several easy steps — actual steps. ‘‘Look for ways to decrease physical inactivity,’’ Ms. Warren says, beyond 30-minute bouts of jogging or structured exercise. Stand up. Pace around your office. Get off the couch and grab a mop or change a light bulb the next time you watch ‘‘Dancing With the Stars.’’

As of tonight, the picture has changed. On a trip to Home Depot for a toilet valve (to replace a leaker which doubled our water bills), we spotted the Phillips Ambient LED PAR38 lamp on the shelf. It looked like a bargain (ha-ha) at $65, so we snatched one up and brought it home.

First in the lab, we plugged it in. We were pretty well amazed at the intensity of this lamp. It lit up the whole room at a pretty good level. The power drain measured 14 watts (the manufacturer’s rating is 16 watts) and the coolish white light output was 550 Lux at about 9 feet. As a comparison, we tested a new 75 watt halogen PAR30 (being replaced by this LED) at 197 Lux at the same distance and, yes, exactly 75 watts. So, 20% of the energy and more than twice the light. Admittedly, this LED is a bit more narrow beam than the halogen but not much.

Putting this light up in the kitchen was not much fun because we needed to replace the face ring with a 5″ to fit the PAR38 size and the socket needed to be re-adjusted for more depth. The lamp itself is a bit heavy for a one-handed spin but it’s done. These pictues provide some idea of the results.

You can click on these images to see a larger version. Note the extra intensity of the LED lamp on the right. The floor below this lamp is much brighter and the existing halogen’s seem dingy in comparison. We will test this lamp for a while before buying more, and the dimmer will have to go of course.

Why The Gun In Civilization?

By Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret)

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force.

If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.

In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.

When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force.

The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.

There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a [armed] mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat–it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed.

People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level.

The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable.

When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force.

It removes force from the equation…and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.

Princeton researchers have developed a plastic process for ink-jet printing conductive polymers shown here in a plastic transistor with interdigitated source and drain (orange) allowing current flow down the active channel (green). Image courtesy of Loo Research Group.

The technique can be adapted immediately to substitute for the ITO used in solar cells, according to Loo. With further development, the technique could also be used for other ink-jet printable electronic applications such as all-plastic large area displays and medical diagnostic devices, Loo said.

Funding for the project was provided by the National Science Foundation, the W.M. Keck Foundation and the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation.
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