At an average of say 17,280 normal breaths per day, about how many exhalations are needed to recycle the carbon-weight gained from each tablespoon of food? Stuff we eat (like meat, veggies & yogurt) has about the density of water, so a tablespoon of food has about 15 grams mass. If most of that mass (say 85% neglecting roughage) is carbon with between 4.5 to 9 kcal of energy per gram that is (eventually) turned into CO2, then we're talking about ~0.85×15/0.048 ≈ 265 normal breaths of exhalation per tablespoon of food.
Does this mean that about 17,280/265 ≈ 65 tablespoons (~ 4 cups or 2 lbs) of food provides all the carbon that you exhale with normal-activity in a day? More food than that, and you either need extra activity or you add carbon weight that will have to await exhalation some other day. Less than your limit, and you may find yourself losing carbon weight or taking steps to conserve energy instead. More (or less) than 4 cups a day might then add (or subtract) as desired. If nothing else, carbon-tracking might help put good-old available-work (i.e. Calorie) tracking into more concrete weight-for-weight terms...
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Monday, June 11, 2012
learning to exhale
Since the only way to lose carbon weight after it's metabolized may be to send it out from your lungs as carbon dioxide, one might recast the problem of weight-balance in the simple maxim: Eat what you plan to breathe out, no less no more!
The various energies widget below might help one get calibrated on how much intake is needed for a given amount of exhalation. For instance, if you plan to do fifty pushups then you probably should consume the 5 Calorie equivalent of a single m&m (plain not peanut). Likewise what would be needed for 5000 steps of walking, or a quarter-mile run?
Getting in the habit of planning each day's respiration, and then ingesting the carbon-based energy needed to support that activity whether we are hungry or not, might thus be good habit to get into...
The various energies widget below might help one get calibrated on how much intake is needed for a given amount of exhalation. For instance, if you plan to do fifty pushups then you probably should consume the 5 Calorie equivalent of a single m&m (plain not peanut). Likewise what would be needed for 5000 steps of walking, or a quarter-mile run?
Getting in the habit of planning each day's respiration, and then ingesting the carbon-based energy needed to support that activity whether we are hungry or not, might thus be good habit to get into...
Thursday, May 31, 2012
re-ward/sponsiblity?
In academic settings, it seems that the "teaching culture" sometimes leads participants to think of grant-awards and manuscript-authorships as accomplishments instead of as responsibilities. This has a number of interesting consequences.
In the area of grant-awards, that reward emphasis puts the focus on how much money one manages to capture instead of what one actually does with it. Instead of being an incentive to get as much done as possible with as little expenditure, it therefore serves as an incentive to attract as much funding as possible to spend. To the extent that getting stuff done is a pre-requisite to attracting funds, the two are coupled, but the approach nonetheless may put the cart before the horse. One consequence is that skill at doing stuff with minimal cost may be far from priority one.
In the area of manuscript-authorships, the reward emphasis puts the focus on the author instead of on the ideas in a manuscript. Again the importance of the two may be correlated, but not always. One prediction in this context is that papers which evolve conventional wisdom are likely to first be made available e.g. on e-print archives before they are considered worthy of awards to their authors. This is a good thing, since it gives ideas (the horse) a chance to spread before folks start worrying about which author (the cart) deserves what.
In the area of grant-awards, that reward emphasis puts the focus on how much money one manages to capture instead of what one actually does with it. Instead of being an incentive to get as much done as possible with as little expenditure, it therefore serves as an incentive to attract as much funding as possible to spend. To the extent that getting stuff done is a pre-requisite to attracting funds, the two are coupled, but the approach nonetheless may put the cart before the horse. One consequence is that skill at doing stuff with minimal cost may be far from priority one.
In the area of manuscript-authorships, the reward emphasis puts the focus on the author instead of on the ideas in a manuscript. Again the importance of the two may be correlated, but not always. One prediction in this context is that papers which evolve conventional wisdom are likely to first be made available e.g. on e-print archives before they are considered worthy of awards to their authors. This is a good thing, since it gives ideas (the horse) a chance to spread before folks start worrying about which author (the cart) deserves what.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
race to the bottom
One-celled organisms will eventually outlast fragile metazoans on this planet, as our sun moves toward it's "cool red-giant" phase. Meanwhile the delicate layers of social structure in communities of social-metazoans (like us) may be dismantled as well. Put another way, border-checkpoints between states and even cities may be in our long-term future as well as in our past.
However there's no need to let new-found electronic communications catalyze a race-to-the-bottom, via its ability to echo neolithic-ideas that are naturally attractive to humans in tough times. Runaway-cartoonification (e.g. bad-mouthing) of others is one of those idea-patterns whose seductiveness we discovered when part of our house was being used by a business, with the incidental consequence that patterns of employee-behavior unperturbed by the observation-process itself were impossible to miss.
Put simply, humans are not always by nature constructive. The ability of ideas to quickly spread themselves across the globe means that a close look at the idea-types that we echo may be quite important in the years ahead. In this context what idea-types would you put on a list of "likely constructive", and what types on list of "possibly de-constructive"?
However there's no need to let new-found electronic communications catalyze a race-to-the-bottom, via its ability to echo neolithic-ideas that are naturally attractive to humans in tough times. Runaway-cartoonification (e.g. bad-mouthing) of others is one of those idea-patterns whose seductiveness we discovered when part of our house was being used by a business, with the incidental consequence that patterns of employee-behavior unperturbed by the observation-process itself were impossible to miss.
Put simply, humans are not always by nature constructive. The ability of ideas to quickly spread themselves across the globe means that a close look at the idea-types that we echo may be quite important in the years ahead. In this context what idea-types would you put on a list of "likely constructive", and what types on list of "possibly de-constructive"?
Monday, February 13, 2012
definitions of life
An organism-centered definition of life, inspired by an article on semantic consensus, is that " life is autonomous self-reproduction with variations". This definition is organism-centered (betraying the pre-occupation of its definers) in that it fails to mention life's place as a hierarchically-ordered multi-layer interface between availability-flows and a substrate.
Perhaps someday this dream of being substrate-independent will be realized, but we are probably not there yet.
Perhaps someday this dream of being substrate-independent will be realized, but we are probably not there yet.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
information ethics
A layer of internal-community ethics that modulates the behavior of its members toward information provided by others can likely be justified on scientific grounds, if one recognizes that niche-network layer-multiplicity is an important part of a community's physical structure. The precise form of this ethics, of course, is likely to differ from community to community and from one culture to the next.
This observation is inspired by the utility of a similar layer of ethics (as a complement to contractual non-disclosure agreements) when working with privileged information in the development of best-practice guidelines for analytical support. Today's news-media, of course, has been tempted to ignore the ethics of information management altogether, in spite of its changing (and growing) relevance to everyday practice.
Look for more on this topic, hopefully soon...
This observation is inspired by the utility of a similar layer of ethics (as a complement to contractual non-disclosure agreements) when working with privileged information in the development of best-practice guidelines for analytical support. Today's news-media, of course, has been tempted to ignore the ethics of information management altogether, in spite of its changing (and growing) relevance to everyday practice.
Look for more on this topic, hopefully soon...
Saturday, January 21, 2012
just-in-time or not
According to Inside jokes (Hurley et al., MIT Press, 2011), humor is likely an evolved reward for shifting the target of our idea-driven just-in-time spreading-activation (JITSA). If so, media-assisted solutions to the adaptive-evolution of institutional-cultures ala Learning to eat soup with a knife (Nagle, U. Chicago Press, 2005) will likely have to take this into account.
In other words: our collective skill at comedy may prove to be a key element of our path to a sustainable future, since comedians are among the few who can give us a visceral reward now (to accompany the benefits that we and our offspring might get long-term) for cleverly changing our tune. Moreover the capacity for mirth is a tool with which humans are especially well-equipped.
N'est pas?
In other words: our collective skill at comedy may prove to be a key element of our path to a sustainable future, since comedians are among the few who can give us a visceral reward now (to accompany the benefits that we and our offspring might get long-term) for cleverly changing our tune. Moreover the capacity for mirth is a tool with which humans are especially well-equipped.
N'est pas?
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