Homeostasis is a thing:
On the other paw, the eyeballometric trend line since mid-April slopes at -1 lb/month and arrives at just over 150 lb in December, so progress continues apace.
Category: Science
If you measure something often enough, it becomes science
-
Monthly Image: Turkey Hen and Chicks
Mary saw a fox trotting behind the garden, gripping a (dead) turkey chick in its jaws, with the hen in hot pursuit. The fox dropped the chick, circled the pine grove, picked up the chick, and departed stage right. The hen eventually led her remaining chicks into the yard, but gathered them underneath while watching for danger:
Turkey hen with chicks – alert She settled down for a few minutes:
Turkey hen with chicks – resting With the fox safely departed, she released the chicks:
Turkey hen with chicks – emerging Then they returned to foraging, with one chick trying out its wings:
Turkey hen with chicks – dispersing Two days earlier, she led nine chicks through the yard; we think the fox picked off a chick a day. She lost two more during the next four days, suggesting they rapidly improve their ability to scamper out of harm’s way.
-
Monthly Science: Water Bottle Refill History
This year’s Northern Star Quilt Guild show in the O’Neill Center at WCSU gave me an opportunity to update last year’s data points, although not quite in the way I expected.
The overview:
Gym water bottle refill station B – overview The left display is rotting out:
Gym water bottle refill station B – left The center display seems undamaged:
Gym water bottle refill station B – center The right display took a direct hit:
Gym water bottle refill station B – right So the middle station refilled 3025 = 10460 – 7435 bottles, roughly eight bottles a day, every day, for a year. Seems like a lot of refilling, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, I didn’t take pictures of the other watering hole last year, but here’s what it looks like now:
Overview:
Gym water bottle refill station A – overview Left:
Gym water bottle refill station A – left Center:
Gym water bottle refill station A – center Right:
Now, it’s entirely possible I have the two stations reversed, in which case I have numbers for all three displays:
- Left = 242 = 4758 – 4516
- Center = 633 = 8068 – 7435
- Right = 800 = 9689 – 8889
Does a bottle or two a day, every day, for a year, seem more reasonable? Hard to say, so, with a bit of luck, we’ll have more data next year.
For science!
-
MPCNC Drag Knife: PETG Linear Bearing
Having reasonable success using a 12 mm hole bored in a 3D printed mount for the nice drag knife holder on the left, I thought I’d try the same trick for the raw aluminum holder on the right side:
Drag Knife holders – detail The 11.5 mm body is long enough to justify making a longer holder with more bearing surface:
Drag Knife Holder – 11.5 mm body – Slic3r preview Slicing with four perimeter threads lays down enough reasonably solid plastic to bore the central hole to a nice sliding fit:
Drag Knife – 11.5 mm body – boring The top disk gets bored to a snug press fit around the flange and upper body:
Drag Knife – 11.5 mm body – flange boring Assemble with springs and it pretty much works:
Drag Knife – hexagon depth setting Unfortunately, it doesn’t work particularly well, because the two screws tightening the MPCNC’s DW660 tool holder (the black band) can apply enough force to deform the PETG mount and lock the drag knife body in the bore, while not being quite tight enough to prevent the mount from moving.
I think the holder for the black knife (on the left) worked better, because:
- The anodized surface is much smoother & slipperier
- The body is shorter, so less friction
In any event, I reached a sufficiently happy compromise for some heavy paper / light cardboard test shapes, but a PETG bearing won’t suffice for dependable drag knife cuttery.
Back to the laboratory …
-
Monthly Science: Weight
Progress is our most important product:
Weight Chart 2019-04 – Ed Now that we’ve begun bicycling more regularly, Winter Bloat is transmogrifying into thigh muscle.
The hills around here become noticeably steeper during winter; we attribute the additional elevation to frost heaves …
-
Monthly Science: Weight
We’d been eating a “healthy” high-carb / low-fat diet, which produced the more-or-less expected 1 lb/yr weight gain over the course of three decades. Given that we eat about 106 Cal/yr, being off by a mere 0.3% seemed fixable, but we were always hungry while trying to cut out calories.
In April 2016, we decided our tummies had come between us, so we switched to a mostly ketogenic diet (clicky for more dots):
Weight Chart 2016 – Ed Having a Master Gardener in the family complicates dietary choices along the ketogenic axis, but Mary raised more green-and-leafy veggies, less squash-and-corn, and we keto-ized our meals reasonably well. Moderation in all things works fine for us, so losing 25 pounds at about 1 lb/week wasn’t particularly stressful.
Continuing through 2017, you can see how regular bike riding season affects winter bloat:
Weight Chart 2017 – Ed Our cycling vacation in July 2018 produced a blip, but the rest of the riding season worked as expected:
Weight Chart 2018 – Ed It’s straightforward to crash-diet two dozen pounds, but maintaining a more-or-less stable weight for the next two years suggests we’ve gotten the annual calorie count about right. FWIW, my bloodwork numbers sit in the Just Fine range, apart from the somewhat elevated cholesterol level typical of a keto-ized diet.
Starting in late 2018, however, a stressful situation of a non-bloggable nature (at least for a blog such as this) produced an unusually high number of road trips, motel stays, and generally poor dietary choices:
Weight Chart 2019-03 – Ed The situation now being over, our lives / exercise / diet will return to what passes for normal around here and my goal is to lose another 10% of my current body weight, ending at 150 pounds, by the end of the year. In round numbers, that requires losing half a pound = 1700 Cal/week, 250 Cal/day. Not power-noshing an ounce or two of nuts a day should do the trick.
If it makes you feel more science-y, you can use the NIH Body Weight Planner, but it produces about the same answer: knock off 300 Cal to lose weight, 250 Cal to maintain it, at essentially the same exercise level as before.
We’ve been recording our weights as dots on graph paper every Saturday evening for the last four decades, so I know for a fact I averaged 148 pounds when I wore a younger man’s clothes. I’ll re-post the 2019 chart, adding four dots every month, during the rest of the year.
This way, you can help keep me on track … [grin]
-
Another WS2812 Failure: Broken Glass
The WS2812 under the 5U4GB full-wave rectifier tube went into pinball panic mode:
Failed WS2812 – 5U4GB Rectifier It’s been running more-or-less continuously since late 2016, so call it
Because I’d be crazy to replace it with another likely-to-fail WS2812, I had to remove both of them before installing SK6812 RGBW LEDs and updating the Arduino Nano.
Unfortunately, I did a really good job of bonding the side light to the tube with epoxy:
Failed WS2812 – 5U4GB broken glass The last tube manufacturing step involved flashing the getter onto the tube envelope, so as to remove the last vestige of air. Admitting air oxidizes the getter:
Failed WS2812 – 5U4GB getter oxidation It was such a pretty tube, too …
5U4GB Full-wave vacuum rectifier – cyan red phase
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 